Rates · what the hour is made of
The rate here is €50 an hour.
Almost nobody else will tell you theirs, and that is the useful part.
Salesforce consulting is quoted as a total, almost never as a rate, because a total cannot be compared and a rate can. So the honest way to answer what a consultant costs is to publish the number, publish the hours behind every price, and let anyone divide one by the other. Below is that arithmetic, what the hour actually buys, and the five questions that get the same number out of somebody who would rather not give it.
Reviewed 9 September 2026. Every figure below is published elsewhere on this site and can be checked against it.
Before the number
Why is a rate so hard to get?
Not because anyone is hiding something shameful. Four structural reasons, and knowing which one you are hitting tells you what to ask next.
A rate invites comparison, a total does not
Two firms quoting the same project can differ by a factor of three and both be describing real work. The moment either publishes an hourly figure, the conversation moves to how many hours and why, which is a harder conversation to win and a much better one for you.
The rate is an average of several people
An agency bills one number for a team where an architect, a developer, an admin and a project manager each cost something different. A single blended figure hides the mix. It is why the same rate can buy a senior for the discovery call and somebody in their first year for the build.
Part of the hour is not the work
Sales, account management, an office, a bench of people between engagements. All of it is legitimate cost and all of it arrives inside the same hour you are buying. The narrower the layer above the person typing, the closer the rate is to the work.
The estimate is a negotiating position
If the total is what gets agreed, the hours behind it never have to be defended. Ask for the hours and the shape of the project appears. Ask only for the total and you are comparing two numbers that describe different amounts of work.
Published, and checkable
The arithmetic, in the open.
Every price on this site is a number of hours multiplied by the same rate. Nothing is rounded to look better and nothing is a starting point for a negotiation. Divide any price by its hours and the same figure comes back.
Sales Cloud implementation
One hundred and seventy four hours. The anchor for this number is a signed statement of work, not a guess about what the market pays.
Service Cloud, and Nonprofit Cloud
One hundred and forty five hours each. Different work, same rate, because the person doing it is the same person.
Pardot to Marketing Cloud Next
One hundred and twenty hours at the base shape, with every addition itemised rather than folded into a bigger round number.
Full architecture
Three hundred and thirty five hours upward. The largest engagement here is priced by the same arithmetic as the smallest.
Scoring and grading rebuild
Forty five hours. Small enough that a padded rate would be obvious, which is exactly why it is a good one to check first.
A repair, when something is already broken
From forty hours. Six symptoms are described with their causes and the check for each, so the cheapest version of this is the one where you diagnose it yourself first and pay for nothing.
Continued support, monthly
Eight, sixteen or thirty two hours a month, with a three month minimum term and an end date rather than a rolling agreement.
What the hour buys
Five things that decide whether a rate is cheap.
A rate on its own is not expensive or cheap. It becomes one or the other depending on five things, and all five are askable before anyone signs anything.
Who actually does the work
The person on the first call and the person in the org are frequently not the same person, and the gap between them is where most disappointment lives. Ask for the name of whoever will be building, and ask what else they are on that month.
Whether the hours are written down before the price
A price derived from hours can be argued about line by line. A price that arrived first and had hours fitted to it cannot, and you will find out which you have the first time the scope moves.
What happens to the work when the engagement ends
Configuration and documentation that live under your own licence cost the same to produce and are worth considerably more, because nothing has to be paid to keep them running. Work that only one supplier can maintain is a rate with a subscription attached.
Whether rework is billed
The cheapest hour in this market is one that is never billed twice. Ask directly what happens when something built to the agreed scope turns out not to work, because the answer separates a fixed scope from a meter.
What the certifications actually cover
Certifications are checkable in public on Trailblazer and worth checking, but they say what somebody has passed, not what they have built. Ask for both, and treat any claim that cannot be verified on a public profile as decoration.
From practice
Where a low rate became the expensive option.
One case, with numbers, because an article about rates should show what the wrong one costs.
An org with three hundred and seventy one active flows and no map
Built over several years by several people, each of whom did the work asked of them at the time. Nothing in it was incompetent. It was simply built without anyone writing down what depended on what, because documentation is the first thing cut when the hour is being squeezed.
The result was an org nobody would touch. Cataloguing it took scripted work against the Metadata API across fifty six objects and six hundred and twenty two object and field pairs, parsed twice by two independent methods to prove the catalogue itself was right. Every hour of that was an hour that would not have been needed if the documentation had been produced alongside the original builds. The rate was never the problem. What the rate excluded was.
Questions
Asked often enough to answer here.
What hourly rate do Salesforce consultants charge?
Here the rate is €50 an hour, and every price on this site is that figure multiplied by a published number of hours. Elsewhere you usually cannot tell, because what you are given is a total, and a total prices a scope rather than an hour. Ask for the hours behind the number and a rate falls out of the division.
Why do most Salesforce consultants not publish their rates?
Because a rate can be compared and a total cannot, because an agency rate is an average across several people of different seniority, and because part of every hour pays for sales and overhead rather than the work. None of that is dishonest, and all of it is a reason to ask what the hour contains.
Is a certified Salesforce consultant worth a higher rate?
Certifications tell you what somebody passed, not what they have built, and they are verifiable in public on Trailblazer in about a minute. Treat them as a floor rather than a premium, check them yourself, and spend the rest of the conversation on what the person has actually delivered.
How do I compare two quotes that differ by a factor of three?
Not on the totals, because they are pricing different amounts of work with the same words. Ask each side for the hours per phase and the difference stops being a mystery: one of them has scoped testing, migration and training, and the other has scoped a build. The cheaper number is often the one that has left out the parts that arrive later anyway.
Why is the rate here lower than an agency quote?
Because there is no layer above the person doing the work. One named senior person builds it, answers the email and writes the documentation, so the hour pays for the work rather than for the structure around it. Where a scope needs more hands, people I have delivered with before come in and I stay accountable for the result.
One next step
Every price, on one page, with the hours.
Nothing to fill in and nobody to speak to first. If the arithmetic above is the kind you want applied to your own situation, the whole list is published and the numbers are the same ones quoted in writing.
Serhii Skrypnyk · Senior Salesforce Administrator and developer · 7 Salesforce certifications · on the platform since 2018. Reviewed 9 September 2026.