Should a professional services firm publish its prices?

Start with the one sector where the question has been answered for it. The Solicitors Regulation Authority requires regulated firms to publish price and service information for a defined list of services, and its guidance names residential conveyancing and uncontested probate among the consumer services covered. A firm with a website is expected to publish it there. For a solicitor selling those services the debate is over. For every other UK professional services firm of ten to fifty people, the decision is still the managing partner's, and the argument most often made for it is about conversion. This article argues from a different measure: what a price on the page does to the quality of the enquiries that arrive.

A price on the page is a filter with two edges

Publishing a figure removes enquiries that would never have cleared the fee, and it may also remove some that would have. The first effect saves partner time. The second costs revenue the firm never sees, because the visitor leaves without a trace. Which effect is larger depends on how well the number describes the work, and that depends on how the fee is set. The matrix sorts the usual fee shapes in a UK practice by what a published figure does for each.

Where a regulator has already decided

Check the regulator before the marketing argument, because the rule overrides the preference. For solicitors, the SRA's guidance on transparency in price and service sets out the services covered and what the published information must contain. The list runs beyond conveyancing and probate to motoring offences, employment tribunals, immigration, debt recovery and business licensing. The published price must come with what it includes, what is not included, who will do the work and typical timescales, which is the scope-beside-the-number rule written into a regulator's requirements. Read the current guidance for the full list, as this summary can go out of date.

Financial advice sits differently. The FCA's conduct rules in chapter 6 of its Conduct of Business Sourcebook deal with the information a firm must give a client about costs and associated charges. We have not found a rule that obliges an adviser to print fees on a website, and this article does not claim one exists. What the rules do mean is that a figure a firm chooses to publish must agree with what it later tells a client, so the page should be written with the compliance function in the room. An accountancy practice or a recruitment agency has no comparable price-publication rule that we have sourced, which leaves the choice with the partner.

A worked case: the practice with a minimum fee

Count what the filter would remove before you decide whether it is worth having. The worksheet uses an invented practice of twenty people. It describes no real firm, and every figure is made up to show the arithmetic. Replace each one with the firm's own enquiry log.

Publishing the method when a number would mislead

If the fee depends on something the visitor has not told you yet, publish what it depends on. A recruitment agency's fee turns on the salary of the role and the terms agreed with the client, so one headline figure would be wrong for most of its work. A page that says what the fee is calculated from and what it covers still lets a hiring manager decide whether to call. It also stops the call from opening with a question the page could have answered. The same applies to a financial advice firm, with the addition that the wording is a compliance matter and not a copywriting one.

Describing a method does not commit the firm to a price. It commits it to being consistent, and writing the method down in one place is how a firm finds out whether it is.

Put the scope beside every number

A figure without its scope is read as the whole fee, and the disappointment lands on the first call. State what the figure includes and what would change it. This is the same discipline we ask of an agency quote, split into lines so that each pound is attributed, as set out in how much a UK firm should pay for AI visibility work. A firm that asks an agency to itemise its fee is in a weak position if its own fees page does not do the same.

What a visitor, and an assistant, can actually read

A price held in an image or a download cannot be copied from the page, so it cannot be quoted. The conditions that let an assistant cite a firm at all are set out in what makes an assistant able to cite your firm, and the first of them is that the answer exists on the page as text. We make no claim about what any assistant will say about a firm's fees. The narrower point is practical: if the firm has decided to publish, publish it as text, so that a partner checking the page and a tool reading it see the same sentence.

Test the decision on quality, over a quarter

Judge a change to the fees page on the share of enquiries the firm would accept, measured over three months. Record each enquiry as accepted, declined for fee or declined for another reason, for a quarter before the change and a quarter after. A week of enquiry volume tells the firm very little, and volume alone will usually fall after a price appears, which is the filter doing its job. If the accepted share does not rise, or the good enquiries the firm can name stop arriving, the page is wrong, and the way to fix it is to change the scope wording before touching the number. To see which UK sectors we introduce firms in, see the professional services we cover. For how an introduction and the fee work, read how it works.

Reading the first month after the change

Expect fewer enquiries first, and judge them by what the partner does with the rest. In the invented practice above, a month of twenty enquiries becomes something nearer twelve once the figure is visible. That is the filter working as designed, so do not revert the page on the strength of the first fortnight. Look instead at how many of the remaining calls reach a proposal, and ask the person taking them whether the opening question has changed from “what do you charge” to “can you do this for us”. The second question is the one a published price should produce.

Who decides inside the firm

The managing partner owns the decision, and the person who takes the enquiry calls should own the measurement. The partner decides what the firm is willing to say in public. Whoever answers the phone knows which calls were wasted and which were lost, and their log is the only evidence this decision has. Give them the three-way tally above and a date to report back. A fees page agreed in a meeting and never measured is an opinion with a URL.

When not to publish yet

Do not publish a price until the firm can say what it includes, and has told its compliance function where one exists. A practice that quotes differently to similar clients has no figure to publish yet, and the page would expose the inconsistency. A regulated firm that has not cleared the wording should not publish a number in the meantime, because a figure that disagrees with the client documents is a fault the firm created for itself. In those cases the first job is internal: agree the scope of each service, then write the page.