What Peers and Colleagues Charging Tells You About Your Own Rates

There’s a version of market research that practitioners do informally and constantly: noticing what peers, colleagues, and practitioners they admire are charging. This information circulates in communities, on websites, in conversations. A practitioner who has been in the field for a while typically has a decent mental map of what the field charges at various stages and positioning levels.

This information is useful. It provides context: a sense of what the market looks like, what rates exist at different points on the experience and positioning spectrum, what’s considered high, mid-range, or entry level in a given field. Without any of this information, the practitioner would be setting rates in a vacuum, which produces its own distortions.

But peer pricing data is also easy to misuse — to let it replace the practitioner’s own honest assessment of their work rather than inform it.

What Peer Pricing Data Reveals

What peer pricing data reveals is the range within which rates in the field currently operate. It shows what other practitioners in comparable contexts are receiving for their work. That range is useful context for calibrating a starting point, for recognizing when a rate is unusually far from field norms, and for understanding what clients in the market may be accustomed to investing.

What it doesn’t reveal is whether the specific peer is pricing accurately for their own work. Peer rates are not automatically well-calibrated. A colleague who charges more than the practitioner may be doing so because their rate genuinely reflects advanced positioning — or because they’ve always charged that and no one questioned it. A colleague who charges less may be appropriately positioned at an earlier stage — or may be underpricing for years, producing a rate the practitioner shouldn’t emulate.

What nobody explains about pricing is that peer data is descriptive, not prescriptive. It describes what other practitioners are charging; it doesn’t specify what the current practitioner should charge. Treating peer rates as instructions — “I should be near this person” or “I can’t charge more than that person” — substitutes someone else’s assessment for the practitioner’s own.

When Peer Comparison Undermines Your Assessment

When peer comparison undermines your assessment is when it becomes a ceiling rather than a context. The practitioner who knows that a well-known colleague charges a certain rate and concludes they can’t charge more — without examining whether their own work, positioning, and outcomes might warrant it — has let peer data override their own assessment.

Peer comparison can also work as a floor in a different way: the practitioner who sees a peer charging very high rates and feels pressure to charge more than their own work currently warrants, in order to signal equivalent status. Both distortions use peer data to replace assessment rather than inform it.

Using Peer Data Without Being Determined by It

Using peer data without being determined by it means holding it as one input among several. It’s context. It helps the practitioner understand where their honest rate assessment sits relative to what the field is doing — whether it’s meaningfully outside the range, whether it’s at the low end in ways that might warrant examination, or whether it’s in a plausible zone given their specific position.

A reason why that is your own is built from the practitioner’s honest assessment of their own work — not from what someone else charges. Peer data can sharpen that assessment by providing context, but it shouldn’t author it. The practitioner who knows their own reason why, and knows what the field is doing, is in a better position than one who knows only the latter.

Building a pricing position that is genuinely yours, informed by but not determined by what peers charge, is part of the deeper work the Abundance GPS Skool community supports. Join us here.