How Long Do Freelance Client Relationships Last?

Clients come and go.?

But how long is the typical client relationship??

I’m only one data point, but I dug into my books and analyzed the longevity of my client relationships since I went full-time five years ago.?

Long story short: about 18 months, if you factor out clients that only have one-off projects.?

But if you’re hungry for details, here are my findings.

I’ve had 28 sources of income. Of those sources, 14 are individual firms, 6 are agencies, 5 are publications, and 3 pay royalties (Medium, Gumroad, and KDP). So, if we nix the platforms that pay royalties, I’ve had 25 clients. We could “unpack” my agency relationships and count the individual firms I’ve written for through those agencies, but I think that would detract from the point of this investigation — we want to focus on where the primary relationship is (i.e., the agency).?

One-off projects have represented 52% of my clients. I defined this category as clients I worked with for two months or less. I could be more nuanced and factor in the client’s original intent — for instance, a business may initially express interest in recurring work, but then, for whatever reason, they decided against it. In that case, you could argue that they were short-term relationships versus truly ad hoc requests.?

So, just to cover my bases, I reviewed why each one-off project relationship ended:

• One relationship wasn’t a good fit for either side.?
• One firm cut their marketing budget when the pandemic hit.
• A second firm did the same last year (no pandemic necessary).
• Two firms ghosted me. One publication did, too.
• Another firm pivoted to an in-house content team.?
• The rest were, transparently, one-off projects.

Active months are more important than relationship length. I looked at two metrics for each client: relationship length and active months.

I calculated relationship length based on the total number of months between my first and last project. (A client could go months without sending a project, but that doesn’t mean the relationship died.)

Active months represent the number of months that I delivered a project during our relationship. So, if I had a client for three months and, in each month, I delivered some piece of content, then that would be three “active months.”?

That brings us to the titular question and purpose of this article. If we look at my entire universe of clients, including one-off projects, my average client relationship has been 9.4 months. If we focus exclusively on clients that developed into true, fruitful, long-term relationships (i.e., no one-offs), then that figure jumps to almost 18 months.

More importantly, on average, those relationships have been active 74% of the time — or, to put that another way, about 9 months in any given 12-month stretch.

That’s what’s important, right??

We want regulars. They help keep the lights on.?

Speaking of...

Agencies tend to be more reliable for long-term work. Of my five longest client relationships, three are/were agencies. That makes sense, as they themselves often work with multiple clients at any given time.?

This all started when I came across Stephanie Trovato 's post, which pondered this very question. *hat tip to Stephanie for the idea*

Naturally, this compelled a lot of responses from the freelancing community — one freelancer has had a relationship with a particular client for 15 years (and counting). Wow. I can only hope to retain my current relationships for double-digit years.

Even though I feel stable, in the grand scheme of time, I suppose I’m still pretty new to this career.?

Anyway, what’s your longest relationship? And why do you think it’s lasted as long as it has?