UK Branding Budget Worksheet
Branding quotes in the UK vary more wildly than almost any other business service. The same brief can come back at £150 from a freelancer, £900 from a small studio and £12,000 from an agency, and none of those numbers is automatically wrong. What makes them hard to compare is that they rarely include the same things.
This worksheet gives you a defensible starting point before you speak to anyone. You decide what your brand actually needs right now, price it against fixed published prices and add the one official fee most businesses forget, so you can tell the difference between a quote that is expensive and a quote that is simply for more work.
What actually drives the price
Four things move a branding quote more than anything else. Scope: a logo alone is a fraction of a full identity system with guidelines. Applications: every place the brand has to live, from van livery to workwear to packaging, is separate design work. Revision model: fixed fee with unlimited revisions and hourly billing produce very different final invoices from the same opening quote. Ownership: whether you receive source files and full commercial rights, or only flattened exports, changes what you are actually buying.
How to use the result
Treat the result as a benchmark, not a ceiling. If a quote comes in well under it, the usual explanation is narrower scope rather than a bargain, so check file formats and revision terms before assuming you have found one. If a quote comes in well over it, ask what specifically accounts for the difference. A good answer will be concrete: research, naming, or a large set of applications.
For real market context rather than estimates, our guide to UK logo costs breaks down what each price tier actually includes, and brand identity design sets out what a full system covers.
Your branding budget in four steps
Work out what your brand actually needs, then what it costs. There are no invented market averages here: the prices below are our own fixed prices, the same ones on our pricing page.
Step 1: What do you actually need right now?
- A mark, nothing more. You need something to put on a van, an invoice and a profile picture. A logo on its own is enough to launch.
- A mark plus the rules around it. You are producing things regularly, and they are starting to look as if they come from different companies. This is where colours, type and basic guidelines earn their money.
- A full identity. You have several channels and other people produce work in your name, so the rules need to be written down and applied.
- A logo you like, but no usable files. You do not need a new design. You need the existing mark redrawn as proper vector artwork.
Step 2: What that costs with us
- Logo design: £129, unlimited revisions, every file format, full ownership
- Brand identity: £299, logo, colours, type, imagery and brand guidelines
- Business cards: £59, print ready
- Recreate & Vectorise: £79 for one layout, plus £39 for each additional layout, if you already have a mark but not the files
Those are fixed prices, not estimates. You order at that price and we collect the brief afterwards.
Step 3: Trademark, if the name matters
A UK trademark filed online costs £205 for the first class and £60 for each additional class, paid directly to the Intellectual Property Office. That is the IPO’s own published fee, not ours: see gov.uk/how-to-register-a-trade-mark. It is worth doing when the name is distinctive and you intend to keep it.
Step 4: What to budget after launch
Most of the ongoing cost is not redesign, it is new applications: a sign, a vehicle, a new document, a new channel. Rather than set aside a guessed annual figure, price each piece as it comes up. Our print and signage prices are published too, so you can plan against real numbers.
Your total
Take the line from Step 2 that matches your answer to Step 1, then add the trademark fee from Step 3 if you need it. Write that figure down before you ask anyone else for a quote, and compare what each quote includes against it.
What this worksheet deliberately leaves out
It does not estimate ongoing marketing, printing or web build costs. Those are genuinely separate budgets, and folding them in is how businesses end up surprised. For the recurring side, use the UK marketing budget worksheet.
Common questions
Is a cheap logo always a false economy? No. If you need a clean wordmark for a one-van operation and you get exactly that, with the source files, at a fair price, that is a good outcome. The false economy is paying twice: once for something unusable at size or in one colour, then again to have it rebuilt properly.
Why do agencies charge multiples of a freelancer? Usually research, strategy, more applications and more people. Sometimes that is worth it. For a business under about twenty staff it very often is not, which is why fixed-fee studios exist in the middle.
Should I budget for a rebrand later? Plan on revisiting your identity when the business changes shape, not on a schedule. Adding services, moving upmarket or merging are real triggers. Boredom is not.
What should I never compromise on? Vector source files and written commercial ownership. Everything else can be redone later. Those two decide whether you own your own brand.