How PR agencies price a monthly retainer, and what it buys

Founders shopping for a public relations or branding agency often receive retainer quotes ranging from a few thousand dollars a month to tens of thousands, with little explanation of how the number was reached. Behind nearly every quote is the same underlying math: an agreed volume of monthly hours, split across a mix of senior and junior staff, each billed at a different hourly rate.

Understanding that math, and the industry data behind it, helps a founder judge whether a quoted retainer reflects the market value of the time being sold, rather than an arbitrary figure.

What a retainer fee is actually paying for

A monthly retainer is a fixed fee for an agreed amount of agency time, not a guaranteed number of media placements. Earned coverage cannot be purchased outright, since a reporter decides independently whether to cover a story. A retainer instead buys pitching, drafting, monitoring and strategic counsel.

That time typically spans several roles: senior staff who set strategy and manage the client relationship, mid-level staff who write pitches and press materials, and coordinators who handle logistics and reporting. Each role carries its own hourly billing rate, and the retainer is essentially those rates multiplied by however many hours the agency allocates to the account each month.

How the number gets built, role by role

Gould+Partners, a consultancy that advises on PR agency mergers and acquisitions, surveys agencies annually on financial performance. Its 2023 Best Practices Benchmarking Report, based on 37 "model" agencies in the US and Canada and covering 2022 results, found average hourly billing rates of $451 for presidents and CEOs, $381 for EVPs and SVPs, $333 for vice presidents, $271 for account managers, $234 for senior account executives, and $187 for account executives.

Those figures did not appear out of nowhere. The same survey series shows president and CEO rates climbing steadily: $360 an hour in 2019, $417 in 2020, $422 in 2021, and $451 in 2022 — a rise of roughly 25% across three years. Because most accounts are staffed with a mix of roles, the effective monthly retainer reflects a blended rate: an average of the individual hourly figures weighted by how many hours each role contributes. A retainer built around heavy senior involvement carries a higher blended rate than one staffed mostly by account executives and coordinators, even if the total hours are identical.

Why the same title costs more at some agencies than others

Billing rates for the same job title vary widely depending on the agency's size. In the 2022 survey covering 2021 results, president and CEO rates ranged from $338 an hour at agencies with under $3 million in annual revenue, to $414 an hour at $3–10 million agencies, $439 an hour at $10–25 million agencies, and $492 an hour at agencies above $25 million in revenue. A year earlier, the same size bands showed CEO rates of $307, $400, $388 and $483 an hour respectively, so the gap between the smallest and largest agencies has been a persistent feature of the market rather than a one-year anomaly.

Geography moves the number too. The 2022 survey ranked president and CEO billing rates by region from highest to lowest as New York/New Jersey, Washington D.C., the US Northeast, the Midwest, Canada, California, the Southeast and the Southwest, though it did not publish exact dollar figures for each region. A founder comparing quotes from a boutique regional shop and a large New York-headquartered firm should expect the blended rate to differ for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of the work.

Rates have kept climbing, pandemic included

Billing rates did not fall during the pandemic. Gould+Partners' 2021 survey of 37 "best of class" North American agencies, covering 2020 results, found increases at every staff level even as the pandemic disrupted business generally, with the firm's managing partner noting that rates rose "at every level" that year. The overall average billing rate across positions rose from $193 an hour in 2019 to $240 an hour in 2020.

The increases have continued since. Gould+Partners' 2024 Financial Trend Report, based on responses from more than 100 PR firms across the US and Canada, found that billing rates rose at 51% of agencies in 2024. Half of agencies reported increased net revenues and 57% reported higher operating profits — beating earlier-year projections of 47% by a swing the firm's managing partner called "major," attributing it to firms "tightening management" and "focusing on the bottom line." Performance varied sharply by region: New York/New Jersey firms led with 79% reporting profitability gains and 55% reporting revenue growth, Southern California agencies saw 72% report profitability increases, and Washington D.C. firms lagged with only 20% reporting revenue gains. Mid-sized firms, those with $10 million to $25 million in annual revenue, posted the strongest results overall, with 72% growing revenue and 64% increasing profit. The PR Council now tracks similar data formally through a members-only Workforce Economics Dashboard that combines compensation, billing rates, utilization and other business benchmarks.

Why the fee is never simply hours times rate

Billing rates alone don't fully explain the final number, because senior staff bill far fewer of their available hours to any single client than junior staff do. A Gould+Partners survey of 41 "best of class" agencies found that presidents and CEOs billed only 32.4% of their theoretical annual working capacity to clients, compared with 69% for vice presidents and 85.4% for account executives.

That gap is effectively priced into the hourly rate. Because a CEO's or senior partner's time is scarce and shared across running the agency, business development and multiple accounts, each billable hour is priced higher to cover the many hours that go unbilled. A founder paying a premium for senior attention is, in practice, subsidizing time that agency leadership spends on everything other than that one account.

What to ask before signing

Because retainers are built from role mix, agency size, location and hours rather than promised outcomes, the most useful question a founder can ask is not what the retainer costs, but whose hours it contains and how many. Requesting the specific hours allocated per role each month, and comparing the implied blended rate against published benchmarks for an agency of that revenue size and region, shows whether a quote is in line with the market or priced well above it for a similar mix of seniority.

It is also worth asking what share of the quoted hours goes to media pitching and drafting, as opposed to internal reporting, status calls and account management, since utilization data suggests a meaningful portion of any agency's time is absorbed by work that doesn't directly produce coverage. None of this converts a retainer into a guarantee of placements. Earned media still depends on a reporter's independent judgment. But it turns an opaque monthly invoice into a number a founder can actually evaluate.

Related coverage: How earned media differs from paid placement, and how each must be labeled; How paid contributor networks like Forbes Councils actually work.