Every year you hold your price steady, you quietly give your clients a raise out of your own paycheck.
When was the last time you raised your fees? Not “added a line item.” Not “charged the new client a little more than the last one.” I mean actually went back to your existing book of business, the people you’ve carried for years, and told them the number was going up.
For most of the tax professionals I coach, the honest answer is “I can’t remember.” Three years. Five years. One guy told me he was charging a client the exact same $400 for a return he first quoted in 2014. Same client. Twelve years. Same four hundred bucks.
Read that again. Twelve years of inflation, twelve years of harder returns, twelve years of your time getting more valuable, and the price never moved.
You are not running a practice. You are running a charity, and you’re the donor.
Here’s the promise. In this post I’m going to walk you through exactly how to raise your fees without watching your best clients walk out the door. The math behind why you have to. The real reason you haven’t. The script, almost word for word. And what to do with the handful who push back. This is the same kind of practice-building work we teach inside Tax Resolution Academy®, and the willingness to send one letter is the only thing it costs you.
The Math You’ve Been Avoiding
Let me do the arithmetic out loud, because the numbers are uglier than you think.
Say you’ve held a client at $400 a return since 2019. Feels loyal. Feels like good service. Now run the inflation on it. To have the same buying power as that 2019 $400, you’d need to charge somewhere north of $500 today just to stand still. So you didn’t “hold your price.” You gave that client a raise every single year, out of your own pocket, without them ever asking.
Now stack it. Say you’ve got 200 clients and you’ve been underpricing the book by an average of $150 each. (Your numbers will vary. These are illustrative, not a promise.) That’s $30,000 a year. Gone. Every year. Not theoretical money, not “potential.” Real revenue you earned the right to and chose not to collect.
And here’s the part that should sting. That $30,000 isn’t sitting in a drawer waiting for you to redeem it next Tuesday. It’s gone forever. You can’t bill 2023 again. You can’t bill 2019 again. The only year you can still fix is the one in front of you.
Come on. You know better.
The Real Reason You Haven’t Done It
Here’s what’s actually happening, and it’s not the reason you tell yourself.
You tell yourself it’s about the client. “They can’t afford it.” “They’ll be upset.” “It’s not the right time, the economy is weird.” That’s the cover story.
The call is coming from inside the house. The real reason you haven’t raised your fees is that you’re afraid of the conversation. You’re afraid that the second you send that letter, the phone rings, and it’s your favorite client of fifteen years saying “I can’t believe you’d do this to me.” You’re afraid of being seen as greedy. You’re afraid one “no” means you misjudged your own worth.
I get it. I respect it. And I’m telling you it’s the single most expensive fear in your entire practice.
Because while you’re protecting yourself from one uncomfortable five-minute phone call, you’re paying for it with thousands of dollars a year, every year, indefinitely. You priced your whole book around the comfort of avoiding a conversation. That’s the trade you’ve been making. You traded your income for the feeling of being liked.
Why Your Best Clients Won’t Actually Leave
I know what you’re thinking. “But Dan, the moment I raise prices, they’re going to shop me. They’ll find some kid on the internet doing returns for $99 and I’ll lose the relationship I spent years building.”
Wrong. Read that again, because the people you’re scared of losing are almost never the ones who leave.
Here’s the truth about your real clients, the good ones. They are not buying a tax return from you. They are buying the fact that they never have to think about it. They’re buying the call you took on a Sunday when they got a CP2000 notice and panicked. They’re buying the levy you got released. They’re buying the night they finally slept because you told them “I’ve got this.” A person who values that does not jump ship over a $150 increase. They were probably wondering why you were so cheap in the first place.
The clients who DO leave over a price increase are the price-shoppers. The ones who haggle every invoice. The ones who text you at 9pm in March and call you “buddy” and then question the bill in May. Here’s the second-order truth most pros miss: when one of those leaves, you don’t just lose a low fee. You free up the calendar space, the mental energy, and the March weekend you were spending on someone who never respected the work. That freed-up capacity is worth more than the fee you lost, because now you can give it to a client who actually pays you what you’re worth.
Losing a price-shopper isn’t a cost. It’s the cleanup.
The Five-Step Way to Raise Fees
A fee increase is not a feeling you work up the nerve to have. It’s a process you run the same way every time, so it works whether you’re feeling brave that day or not. Here are the five steps.
Step 1: Decide the number before you decide who to tell
Do the math first, cold, with nobody’s face in your head. What does a return like this actually need to bill to be worth your time at your target rate? Set the new number based on the work and your worth, not on how you think a specific nervous client will react. The minute you start setting the price around one person’s imagined reaction, you’ve lost. Set the schedule, then apply it.
Step 2: Give real notice, in writing, before the season
Never spring a new fee on a client at the moment they hand you their documents. That feels like an ambush, and it should. Send the increase in writing, well ahead of filing season, so it lands as a calm business update and not a hostage negotiation in April. A letter or email in the fall or early winter gives everyone room to absorb it. The client who gets 90 days’ notice almost never argues. The client who gets the number at the counter on April 1st always does.
Step 3: Anchor it to value, not to your costs
Nobody cares that your software renewal went up. That’s your problem, not theirs, and leading with it makes you sound like you’re apologizing. Anchor the increase to what they get. The proactive planning. The fast response when a notice shows up. The fact that their return is done right by a licensed professional who answers the phone. Remind them what the relationship actually buys them, then state the new number plainly.
Step 4: State the number once, then stop talking
This is where most pros blow it. They state the new fee and then keep going. “It’s going up to $550, but I totally understand if that’s a lot, and we can maybe work something out, and I know times are tough…” Stop. Every word after the number is you negotiating against yourself before the client has said a thing. Say the number. Then be quiet. Let the silence sit. Confidence is contagious, and so is apology.
Step 5: Hold the line on the good ones, triage the rest
When the increase goes out, you’ll get three reactions. Most clients say nothing and pay it, because they already assumed you were underpriced. A few say “totally fair, thanks for the heads up.” And a small number push back. That’s the group you triage, and we’ll do exactly that in the next section.
The Script (Almost Word for Word)
Stop trying to invent the words in the moment. Use this as your starting template and make it yours:
“I wanted to give you a heads up before the season starts. Beginning with this year’s return, my fee for your return will be $[new number]. Over the last few years the work has grown more complex and my time more limited, and I’ve kept your pricing flat far longer than I should have. The thing that hasn’t changed is how seriously I take taking care of you, the planning, the fast answers when the IRS sends something, and making sure it’s done right. I wanted you to hear it from me directly and early. As always, I’m grateful to work with you.”
Notice what that does. It gives notice. It anchors to value, not to your costs. It states one clear number. It doesn’t apologize, doesn’t beg, doesn’t leave a trapdoor open for negotiation. And it closes warm. You can send that as a letter, an email, or say it on a call. (Use AI to draft your own version, save it as a template in your email folder so you can copy and paste it next year without rewriting the whole thing from scratch.)
What to Do With the Few Who Push Back
Some will push back. Plan for it so it doesn’t rattle you when it happens.
- The “I had no idea things had gotten so expensive” client. This person isn’t really objecting, they’re processing out loud. Don’t cave. Reaffirm the value, hold the number, and let them land where they land. Nine times out of ten they pay it.
- The genuine hardship client you actually want to keep. You’re allowed to make a deliberate exception. The key word is deliberate. You decide, in advance, this specific person gets a held rate for one more year because of a real situation, and you tell them it’s a one-time courtesy. That’s a choice. It is completely different from caving on the whole book because one email made you sweat.
- The chronic haggler. Let them go. I mean it. This is the person who has cost you the most aggravation per dollar for years. Thank them, wish them well, and reclaim the bandwidth. You’ll fill that slot with someone better and be relieved you did.
Here’s a tactical aside worth its own paragraph. Build a tier into your offering before you raise prices, so clients have somewhere to “step down” to instead of out. Have a basic service and a premium service. When someone balks at the full fee, you’re not stuck choosing between losing them and discounting. You move them to the leaner tier at a fair price for less hand-holding. You keep the relationship, protect your margin, and let THEM choose the lower service instead of you eating the difference. The cost to build that tier is one afternoon writing up what’s in and what’s out. Compare that to the thousands you bleed every year carrying everyone at the low number, and it pays for itself the first time you use it.
Why This Is a Duty, Not a Favor to Yourself
I want to reframe this, because if you only hear “charge more,” you’ll file it under greed and never do it.
You have a moral obligation to be priced for survival. Not a preference. An obligation. Here’s why. When you underprice yourself into resentment and exhaustion, the quality of your work suffers, your patience with clients thins, and eventually you burn out and either quit or start cutting corners. The client who trusted you loses the one person who actually had their back.
And there’s a villain in this story. Every time a good practitioner prices themselves into the ground and walks away, a taxpayer in trouble ends up in the hands of some sleazy tax resolution mill, the kind that runs late-night ads, promises to settle for “pennies on the dollar,” takes a fat retainer, and ghosts them. You staying in business at a sustainable fee is what keeps your clients out of those hands. Charging what you’re worth isn’t taking from your clients. It’s protecting them. Yes, it may sound a little dramatic, but it’s true, and you know it.
Read that again. A fair fee is how you stay good, stay around, and stay the person they call instead of the mill.
Bake It Into the Calendar
Motivation is unreliable. A system is not. So don’t make raising fees a soul-searching event you put off every year. Make it a recurring line item.
- Set an annual fee review on your calendar. Same date every year, in the fall, before season. You review the schedule and decide what moves. It happens because the calendar says so, not because you finally felt brave.
- Send the increase letter on a fixed date. One template, lightly updated, out the door every year. The clients who get an annual, predictable adjustment stop treating it as an event at all. It becomes just how working with a professional works.
- Track the fallout. Note who pushed back and who left. You’ll find it’s a tiny number, and almost always the clients you’re better off without. Proof, in your own data, that the fear was bigger than the reality.
This is the same move behind every system that pulls you out of the weeds. If you’ve read my piece on why doing low-value work yourself is quietly costing you, you already know the pattern: take the thing you avoid out of fear and turn it into a repeatable process that runs on a schedule instead of on your nerve. Pricing is no different.
Your Assignment This Week
Don’t overthink this. Pick one thing and do it before Friday.
- Open your client list and find the five clients you’ve underpriced the longest. Just five. Look at what you’re charging them versus what the work is worth now.
- Write your fee-increase template using the script above, and save it in your email folder so it’s ready to send.
- Or pick the one chronic haggler who’s been draining you for years and decide, today, that this is the season you let them go.
One action. That’s it. Because a fee increase you keep meaning to send is worth exactly the same as no increase at all, which is what you have right now.
You built a practice people are happy to pay for. The only thing missing is that you never gave them an updated number, calmly and on time. Give them that, hold the line on the ones worth holding, and your income catches up to the value you’ve been handing out for free.
Now go set the number.
Dan Henn, CPA, CTR®
Co-Founder, Tax Resolution Academy®
Managing Member
Tax Pro Academy, LLC
P.S. Want to learn more about the Tax Resolution Academy®, go to https://community.taxresolutionacademy.com.
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