What does a freelancer charge for social media graphics?
Most freelancers charge by the day or the hour, or quote a price per post or per month. YunoJuno's 2026 rates report, built from more than 182,000 freelance bookings, puts the average UK freelance graphic designer's day rate at £348, or roughly £45 an hour. Motion designers, who animate posts, average £385 a day.
We assume £40 an hour, a little below that average. At about 1.5 hours a post, that's around £60 for each one.
What does an agency charge?
Agencies charge more because their rate covers more than design time: an account manager, creative direction and the reviews in between. The Wow Company's BenchPress survey, the main benchmark for UK agencies, found an average of £86 an hour for agencies with turnover under £1 million in 2021, and reports of its 2025 survey put blended rates at £104 an hour for smaller agencies and £122 for larger ones.
We assume £80 an hour, below all of those. That still puts the same post at about £120.
Why does one post take an hour and a half?
There's no reliable industry figure for this, so 1.5 hours is our own estimate. The design itself can be quick: adapting an existing layout for a simple static post might take a designer 20 to 40 minutes. What adds up is everything around it:
- The brief: explaining what the post is for, sending the copy and the pictures.
- Resizing: a square post for the feed, a portrait one, a story, a LinkedIn version. Each size needs its own layout, not just a crop.
- Changes: at least one round of feedback, and often more.
- Animation: a post that moves, built in After Effects, can take two to three hours on its own.
So 1.5 hours is an average across simple and animated posts, including resizing and changes, not a figure for every post.
What about doing it in-house?
A full-time graphic designer in the UK earns about £31,000 a year on average (Indeed, September 2026), before National Insurance, pension and software. That makes sense if you have enough design work to fill their week.
Without a designer, making posts yourself is the cheapest option on paper, but it has two costs that don't show on an invoice. The first is time: someone who isn't a designer can spend an hour getting one post to look right. The second is consistency. When several people make posts in a general design tool, fonts, spacing and colours start to drift, and the brand gets harder to recognise. (More on why that matters in Brand familiarity: why people buy from brands they know.)
BrandStudio sits in between. Our designers build your brand guidelines into templates once, with the fonts, colours, logos and layouts locked in place. After that, anyone on your team changes the words and pictures and exports the post in every size, as a JPEG or an MP4, in a few minutes.