How Much Do Web Designers Make?

Web designers currently make an average of $29.43 per hour (or $62,586 per year), according to salary data from surveys published across the web. However, the key to understanding your true earning potential as a web designer lies beneath the surface of these figures.

Average Web Designer Salary Statistics

Note: Some estimates were calculated using available data based on the assumption of full-time working hours (40 hours per week, 52 weeks per year).

The statistics on how much web designers make differ from source to source. That’s because many job salary sites pull from their own user sets. For a website like Indeed, for instance, that means their data is more reflective of what employed designers make (rather than freelance web designers).

Regardless, this should give you a good idea of what your earning potential is. How much you earn as a web designer ultimately depends on the decisions you make for your web design business.

Is website design profitable?

Website designers make good money, and this is largely because of the high demand for their unique skills. Most people decide to become a web designer because they enjoy the creative and oftentimes challenging process of building websites and apps. But it’s also a gig that’s ripe with opportunity.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the job outlook for web designers and developers in the US is very optimistic. Between 2022 and 2032, the BLS estimates a 16% increase in jobs, which is much faster than the average job growth for all occupations.

With such high demand for web designers, employers and clients are willing to pay good money to hire an experienced professional.

If you’re looking to maximize your earnings as a web designer, there are five main factors to pay attention to. Below, we’ll break down average web designer earnings according to each of these factors and offer tips for how to work them to your advantage.

Experience level

Like the case with many other lines of work, the more experience you have, the more money you can make from a career in web design. Here’s a look at how the average hourly wage of a web designer changes based on the number of years of experience they have.

Web Designer Average Salary by Experience Level

Source: PayScale.

Keep in mind that increasing your experience level in web design isn’t just about putting in more hours or years on the job. Employers pay experienced designers more because they have broader and stronger skill sets, greater industry knowledge, and impressive portfolios.

For example, your seniority level will change as you gain more years of experience. According to Glassdoor, senior web designers earn $96,894 per year, much higher than the average for regular web designers ($68,699 per year).

While these are the reported average earnings of web designers at different stages of their career, you won’t necessarily be stuck at these rates. There are other factors you can take advantage of to increase your web design wages.

Specialty

The catchall term “web designer” refers to someone who knows how to design modern, high-quality websites. These websites are built to attract visitors from around the web and turn them into users (customers, subscribers, members, etc.).

If you’re interested in a particular aspect of web design, you might choose to become a specialist. For instance, here are some of the advanced specialties that web designers can pursue:

• User interface (UI) design: Concerns the look and layout of a website or app. A UI web designer’s goal is to design something that’s attractive, intuitive, and enjoyable to use.
• User experience (UX) design: Concerns how a website or app feels to users. UX designers conduct extensive research and tests to ensure that every aspect is tailored to users’ preferences, goals, and needs.
• Interaction design: Concerns the elements that dictate users’ engagement with a website or app. The goal of an interaction designer is to make a user’s interactions with these elements as seamless and user-friendly as possible.

By developing advanced skills and pursuing further education and certifications, you can increase how much you make in web design. To give you an idea, the table below breaks down average hourly wages for various web design specialties.

Web Designer Average Salary by Specialty

Source: PayScale.

For some web designers, it’s not be about finding a specialty that pays a lot. Instead, it might be about finding the right specialty for their interests and skill set. That said, it’s still a good idea to know what your earning potential is before you jump into a specialty.

Location

What a web designer makes in one city, state, or country can greatly differ from what they’d make elsewhere.

SalaryExpert is a good resource if you’re interested in seeing what your average salary would be around the globe. You can also use PayScale to explore your earning potential in cities across the United States. For example, the table below shows the average wage for web designers in five random cities.

Web Designer Average Salary by City

Source: PayScale.

There are a couple of reasons why location can impact how much you make as a web designer. For starters, employers looking for on-site designers may be willing to pay more if they’re located somewhere with a limited hiring pool, like a rural area. They’re also likely to offer a higher wage in areas with a high cost of living.

Even if you work as a remote freelancer, location still matters. While your employer or client might not be as concerned with your cost of living, it’s something you should factor in when deciding whether to accept a job since you could lose a huge chunk out of your earnings if you’re not careful.

Industry

Another factor that can impact your salary is the industry of the companies you work for. Companies with huge profit margins, for instance, have much more money to devote to web design. What’s more, they tend to need more complex websites or apps, which they’re willing to pay a higher price for.

The table below offers some insight into how your earnings can differ depending on the industry you work in.

Web Designer Average Salary by Industry

Source: Zippia.

There are no guarantees when it comes to income based on industry. While some industries pay web designers more because they rely on them more heavily or have a bigger web design budget, the size and age of the individual company matter as well.

Take the restaurant industry, for instance. It’s notorious for having low profit margins. So while a brand new restaurant in Melbourne, FL might not be able to offer you more than $15 per hour to design a website, a big restaurant chain could pay much more.

Employment type

A freelance web designer’s salary won’t be the same as an in-house web designer’s salary. Although freelancers can set their rates higher, reported average salaries indicate that freelance web designers tend to have a lower overall yearly income than employed website designers.

Employed vs. Freelance Web Designer Average Salaries

Source: Glassdoor. Hourly and monthly estimates are based on yearly figures, under the assumption of full-time working hours (40 hour per week, 52 weeks per year).

Even though freelance website designers can set their own rates and fees, there are a couple reasons why they don’t necessarily earn more. First, freelance web designers may not actually work as much as full-time employees. They could be earning a higher hourly rate but work only part-time, meaning a lower overall income but more value in exchange for their time.

Second, employed web designers usually get fixed hours and a steady income, allowing them to continue earning money even when business is slow. When you’re running your own web design business and finding your own clients, you may have low periods where work is harder to come by.

You don’t have to move to a new city or get a degree in UX design to make more money. There are other ways to maximize your earning potential as a web designer. Here are some easy tips that’ll help pad your wallet.

1. Charge a flat rate

While jobs that pay on an hourly, monthly, or yearly basis have the benefit of helping you budget effectively and get a clear view of your earnings, you’ll get more money by charging a flat rate for your web design work.

A flat rate is what industry professionals refer to as value-based pricing. Rather than assign a monetary value to the amount of time you put into designing a website, you assign a value to the final digital product you make for a client.

For example, let’s say it typically takes you 80 hours to design, develop, and launch a website. At the average rate of $29.43, that comes out to $2,354.40. That’s not bad.

However, with value-based pricing, you factor in what that website is actually worth to your client. For that same 80-hour website, you might end up charging a flat fee of $5,000 (which is around the average cost of a website these days).

To figure out how much to charge, you first need to determine how much time you’re saving the client by designing the site for them. You can use your hourly rate to figure that out.

You then need to estimate how much money your client will make from that website after launch. That’s the real value of what you do—building a revenue-generating asset that will continue to make your client money long after you’re gone.

2. Keep your overhead low

If you work for an employer, you won’t have many costs to worry about—if anything, just bus fare or gas for your commute to work. If you’re a freelance web designer, on the other hand, you’ll have a wide range of expenses that can affect your final income.

Here are typical work-related expenses for a freelance web designer:

• Rent for a home office or coworking space
• Internet
• Electricity
• Computer and other hardware
• Web design tools and software
• Health and professional insurance
• Professional website and associated hosting and domain fees

These costs can easily add up. The more you spend on this business overhead, the less money you’ll actually be bringing in. Remember that in this sense, your hourly or flat rate doesn’t reflect your real take-home pay.

This is why you should have a budget that accounts for everything you need. When your profits go up, you can add things you want to that budget. In general, though, keeping your overhead low will help you maximize your earnings.

3. Acquire new skills

Let’s go back to the concept of a value-based rate. Just as your hourly rate can change over time, so can your flat rate. It’s all about making yourself more valuable to clients.

Here are a few examples of skills you could pick up to drastically increase your earning potential:

• Coding: A web designer who learns how to do advanced coding could be a huge asset to clients. Rather than have to pay for both a designer and a developer, they’ll only have to pay one person to design and build their website.
• Graphic design: One key skill clients drool over is graphic design. Having a web designer who’s able to create a beautiful logo and branded graphics is a huge win for them. Rather than have two designers with different approaches and creative visions working for them, they’d have just you.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): This is one skill that will always be in high demand. A web designer who knows how to build websites that rank on the first pages of Google search results could bring businesses more leads and revenue.

The more skills you add, the more valuable you’ll be. Not only will you be able to charge more—you’ll also find that your refined skill set attracts more esteemed clients.

4. Add monthly maintenance services

All of the additional skills mentioned above could be sold to clients as add-on services. That way, you could still work with clients who want that $5,000 website as well as clients who want a $5,000 website plus $1,500 worth of SEO.

However, those aren’t the only additional services you can offer clients. One popular add-on is monthly website maintenance. This is an essential service that ensures that a website you build remains in good shape over time.

Monthly maintenance services involve the following tasks:

• Updating software
• Performing backups
• Security monitoring
• Performance monitoring
• Fixing bugs or broken links
• Providing general tech support

Depending on your area of expertise, you could also include blog updates, image optimization, or other services.

Consider offering different pricing tiers to allow clients to choose the amount of maintenance they need. Depending on the size of their site, you could charge anywhere from $25 to $2,000 per month.

Any amount of recurring revenue will increase your overall earnings. Not only that—it’s also great for bringing stability and predictability to your web design income.

5. Sell digital products

Another way to bring in more money is to sell digital products. As a web designer, there are tons of products you can sell. Here are just a few examples:

• Website templates and themes
• Plugins or extensions
• UI kits
• Stock images or videos
• Icon sets
• Fonts
• Custom photography services
• Premade websites
• E-books
• Marketing templates

All you have to do is set up a shop on your website or a vendor account on a site like Envato marketplace or TemplateMonster. Publish your digital products, optimize their descriptions and pages for search engines, and then sit back as they bring in revenue.

Just make sure that you keep these products updated so that they’re modern, relevant, and bug-free. Digital products are a good way to generate passive income, but they do require occasional upkeep.