Glossary
Blended Rate
Also known as: Blended bill rate
A blended rate is a single bill rate quoted for a team of mixed seniority, calculated as the hours-weighted average of each role's rate. If a project uses 60 senior hours at ₹2,500 and 140 junior hours at ₹1,200, the blended rate is ₹1,590 — one number that stands in for the whole staffing mix.
Clients like blended rates because they simplify procurement: one rate, one purchase-order line, no debate about how many senior hours a task deserves. Vendors like them because they avoid rate-card negotiations role by role. The simplification is real, and so is the risk hiding inside it.
A blended quote is only as good as the staffing-mix assumption behind it. If the quote assumed 30% senior time and delivery actually consumes 50%, the engagement loses money at the agreed rate — and nothing on the invoice reveals it. The mix assumption belongs in the statement of work, with a right to requote if actuals drift beyond an agreed band.
The weighted average also differs from the intuitive average: quoting the midpoint of your highest and lowest rates overstates what mixed work earns whenever junior hours dominate, which they usually do.
How Workclave handles this
Because every Workclave session is attributed to a person and project, the delivered seniority mix is visible while the engagement runs. Blended-rate erosion caught in week three is a staffing correction; caught at invoicing, it is a write-off. blended rate calculator.
Related terms
Effective hourly rate is the money actually collected from a client or period divided by every hour worked to earn it, including non-billable time. It is the truest measure of what work earns: a studio quoting ₹1,800 an hour that collects ₹3,00,000 for 220 hours of total effort has an effective rate of about ₹1,363.
Read definition →The cost rate is what one hour of a person's time costs the business — salary plus overheads spread over working hours. The bill rate is what a client is charged for that hour. The ratio between them, the multiplier, is where a services firm's entire economics lives: rent, bench, sales, management and profit all have to fit inside it.
Read definition →Billable hours are the units of work time that can be charged to a client under a contract or engagement. They exclude internal activities like admin, training, or bench time that the client does not pay for. For services firms, billable hours are the direct link between effort and revenue.
Read definition →Project margin is what remains of an engagement's revenue after the cost of delivering it — primarily the hours consumed, priced at each contributor's cost rate. A ₹6 lakh project that consumes 320 hours at a ₹900 blended cost rate has a delivery cost of ₹2.88 lakh and a gross margin of 52%.
Read definition →