How to price WordPress care plans: find your floor, find the ceiling, then build tiers

A care plan's price has a floor and a ceiling. The floor is what one site costs you each month, with the bad months counted. The ceiling is what the site's upkeep is worth to the client. Work out both from your own numbers, price between them, and check what is left.

By: WP Ministry
Published: October 8, 2026

In short

A care plan's price sits between a floor and a ceiling. Work out both before you look at anyone else's price list.
The floor is the hours one site takes each month at your hourly cost, plus tools and licenses. Time one real round. Do not estimate it.
Spread last year's incident hours across every site and every month. The fewer sites you have, the larger that allowance has to be.
The ceiling is what an hour down or a lost week costs the client. Ask for their numbers and run them.
Write edit time in minutes, price it as fully used, and say what happens when it runs out.
Every tier gets backups and security updates. Vary edit time, a staging copy, store checks and how fast you reply.

A care plan's price has a floor and a ceiling. The floor is what one site costs you each month, with the bad months counted. The ceiling is what the site's upkeep is worth to the client. Price between the two, then check what is left with the care plan margin calculator.

This page gives no market prices. What another agency charges covers its costs, not yours. Every figure in the method is your own, and each example below uses made-up round numbers that only show the arithmetic.

What does one site cost you each month?

That figure is the floor. Build it in seven steps.

Step 1: List the recurring jobs
Write down what you do for one site on a schedule: apply updates, look at the site afterward, check that the backup ran, test a restore, read the monitor and the scan, send the report. The WordPress maintenance checklist has the full round by week, month, quarter and year. What WordPress maintenance includes says what each job is for.

Add the jobs that arrive on someone else's calendar. PHP is one: each release branch gets two years of full support and two more of security fixes, then none. Decide now whether moving a site to a newer branch is in the plan or quoted.
Step 2: Time one real round
Run the whole round on one typical site with a clock going. Count the logging in, the waiting and the note you write.

Applying an update is the short part. WordPress installs its own minor and security releases in the background on most sites, and an administrator can switch on automatic updates one plugin and one theme at a time. The look afterward is where the minutes go, so that is what to time.

Time a store separately. WooCommerce's update guide adds a backup, a run on a staging site, a database update when one is asked for, then a test order and a check of shipping, tax, payment and email.

Multiply the timed round by the number of rounds in a month.
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Step 3: Add the tools and licenses
There are two kinds, and they are counted differently.
- Paid for the whole account: backup storage, monitoring, a scanner, a dashboard for managing many sites. Divide the monthly bill by the number of sites it covers. WordPress's backup guidance is to keep at least three to five recent backups in different places, so storage is a real line.
- Paid for one site: premium plugins and themes. Divide the yearly renewal by twelve.
Read what each license covers before you assume one purchase serves several clients. A WooCommerce.com subscription is one example. It is billed for one or two years at a time, and one key covers one live site and one staging site. If it expires, the extension stays installed and stops receiving updates. Renew it long after that and, WooCommerce's documentation says, the price may be the current one and not what was first paid.

Settle who holds each license. WooCommerce describes three ways: the client buys it, you buy it and transfer it, or you keep it. If you keep it, the bill is yours and belongs in your floor.
Step 4: Add an allowance for the bad months
Some month a site will be hacked, or an update will break it. Price that month in advance. Otherwise it is paid out of the year's profit.

Add up the hours you spent on incidents over the last twelve months, across every site. Divide by twelve, then by the number of sites. The result is the incident time each site carries every month.

Incidents are long because finding the cause is slow. For a fault with no obvious cause, WordPress's advice is to deactivate plugins one at a time until you find it. Its guide for a hacked site runs from writing down what you see, through scanning, resetting every password and removing the hack, to working out how the attacker got in.

With no history to go on, rehearse. Restore one site from its backup onto a staging copy and time it. That is your shortest bad day.
Step 5: Add client email and the report
Log one month of it: questions answered, requests passed on, invoices chased, the report written and sent. The monthly maintenance report template keeps the report short. This is the line most easily left at zero.
Step 6: Put your hourly cost against the hours
Use what an hour costs you, which is more than a wage.

One public figure shows the gap. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in June 2026, wages and salaries were 70.0 percent of what private employers paid for an hour of work. Benefits were the other 30.0 percent. That is an average over employees in every occupation in U.S. private industry. It leaves out the self-employed, and it counts nothing for rent, software or hours that cannot be billed. It shows that the gap exists. It is not a number to use.

If the hour is your own, use what you would bill it for on client work.
Step 7: Add it up
Hours for one site each month, times your hourly cost, plus tools and licenses for that site. That is the floor. A price at the floor pays for the work and leaves nothing.

A worked floor, with made-up numbers

Every figure in this table is invented and round, chosen to make the arithmetic easy to follow. None is a rate or a price to copy. The example agency looks after 20 sites, and an hour of its time costs it $100.

Line	Where the figure comes from	One site, each month
Routine round	Timed, then multiplied by the rounds in a month	60 minutes
Client email and the report	One month's log	20 minutes
Incidents	40 hours last year, divided by 12 months and by 20 sites	10 minutes
Time	90 minutes at $100 an hour	$150
Tools for the whole account	$200 a month, divided by 20 sites	$10
Licenses for this site	$120 a year, divided by 12	$10
Floor		$170

The average hides two things.

First, the 40 hours did not arrive evenly. If one incident took 20 of them, that site cost $2,000 in a single month.

Second, the allowance depends on how many sites share it. Spread the same 20-hour incident over 5 sites and not 20, and it is 20 minutes on every site, every month, for a year.

So a short list of sites is more exposed to one bad month than a long one. Hold a larger allowance, or write into the plan that repairs after a break-in are quoted separately. The care plan proposal template has a line for exactly that.

What is the upkeep worth to the client?

That figure is the ceiling. It has nothing to do with your costs: it is what the client loses when the work is not done.

Price an hour of downtime

The downtime cost calculator takes what the site brings in each month, the hours in which it earns, and the hours it was down. Use the client's numbers, and ask the client for them.

A made-up pair shows the spread. The figures are chosen only because an average month has 730 hours. A store that brings in $73,000 a month at all hours earns $100 an hour. A brochure site whose inquiries are worth $7,300 a month earns $10 an hour. One day down costs the first $2,400 and the second $240.

Price a lost week

Some damage outlasts the outage.

A restore puts the site back to the day of the backup. Whatever was added since is gone. On a store, that includes orders.
Google's crawlers slow down when a site answers with server errors. Google's documentation says pages already in its index are kept at first and eventually dropped.

Why a store or a lead-generating site supports a higher price

Its bad hour costs more, so the same work protects more. Its round is also longer, so its floor is higher too. A brochure site that brings in little by the hour has a low ceiling, and a plan priced for a store will not fit under it.

The client has one more measure: what the upkeep would cost if they did it themselves. The WordPress maintenance cost calculator works that out from their own hours and tools, and the guide to WordPress maintenance cost sets out the comparison from the buyer's side.

The ceiling is not your price. It tells you how much room there is above the floor. When a site's ceiling is below your floor, that site cannot carry the plan at your costs. Offer it less work, or do not offer it a plan.

How do you turn the two figures into plans?

Two or three tiers are enough. Each tier is the floor for a different amount of work, with your margin on top.

What to vary between tiers

What changes	Why it changes your cost
Included edit time, in minutes	It is labor sold in advance.
Updates run on a staging copy first	The round is done twice, and the copy has to be kept current.
Checks particular to a store	A test order after updates, and a check of shipping, tax, payment and email.
How fast you reply	A reply promised within a set time means someone is kept available in those hours, whether a client writes or not.

What never to vary

Backups and security updates. WordPress's hardening guide says older versions are not maintained with security updates, and that once a fix is released, the information needed to exploit the hole is almost certainly public.

A cheap tier without them saves you nothing. It moves the cost into your incident allowance, and the client holds you responsible all the same.

A tier may add to the base: backups kept longer, or taken more often for a store's orders. No tier goes below it.

Price per site

The work is per site. Each one has its own plugins, its own updates and its own look afterward.

For a client with several sites, take off only what is shared: one contact, one invoice, one run of reports. Work out the minutes saved and discount those. Do not pick a percentage.

How do you stop included edit time from losing money?

An allowance of edit time is the part of a plan most likely to lose money. The routine takes about the same time every month. Requests do not.

Give a number, in minutes. "Up to 30 minutes a month" can be priced. "Unlimited edits" cannot, and neither can "small changes" with no figure beside it.
Say what counts. Give examples: a changed phone number, a swapped image, a new name on the team page. Say what does not count: a new page, a new feature, a redesign.
Say what the smallest unit is. If every request is counted as at least a quarter of an hour, write that down.
Decide on rollover, and write it. The simplest rule is that unused time ends with the month. If time rolls over, cap it. With no cap, a made-up client on 60 minutes a month who asks for nothing all year is owed 12 hours at once.
Price it as used. Put the whole allowance into the floor at your hourly cost. In the made-up example above, 30 minutes of edit time adds $50 and the floor becomes $220. If clients use less, that is margin. If you price half and they use all of it, that is a loss.

Track it

Log every request: the date, what was asked, the minutes. Show the minutes used and the minutes left in the monthly report. A client who sees the count every month is not surprised by it.

Decide what happens over the allowance

Choose one rule and put it in the plan. The work waits for next month, or it is quoted, or it is billed at a stated hourly rate. Whichever you choose, the client approves in writing before the clock starts.

The rule that loses money is the unwritten one, where you do the work and say nothing.

What changes if a partner does the work?

If a white-label partner does the routine, your cost for a site has three parts.

The wholesale price for that site.
Your own time on the client. The client still writes to you. You answer, pass requests on, read the report before it goes out, and send the invoice.
Whatever your plan promises that the partner's plan does not include. Lay the two lists side by side. Each gap is work you do or buy, and it goes into your floor.

The margin on top has to cover what is left: invoices that are paid late or not at all, what your payment provider keeps of each charge, the time it takes to win the client, and your profit.

One example of reading a partner's list: WP Ministry's white label is its Essential care plan, delivered under your agency's brand, for agencies with three or more client sites. That plan has no edit time, and malware cleanup is not part of it. An agency that resells it with an edit allowance supplies that time itself, or adds a block of agency hours each month.

Then put your figures into the care plan margin calculator: what you charge for one site, what you pay to have the work done, your own hours on the site, and what an hour of that time costs you. It shows what is left for one site and for all of them.

Run it twice: once with your hours in a quiet month, once with your hours in a bad one. A plan that is profitable at zero hours of your time and loses money at two is priced for the month in which nothing happens.

Should you sell annual plans, charge a setup fee, or raise prices?

Annual plans

For: you are paid ahead, and the client has committed for the year.

Against: your price is fixed for twelve months and your costs are not. You are also holding money for work not yet done, so the plan needs a written rule for what is returned if either side ends early.

A discount for paying by the year comes straight out of the margin. Run it first. In made-up figures: a plan priced at $200 a month on a floor of $170 keeps $30 a month, or $360 a year. "Two months free" gives away $400. That year is sold at a loss of $40.

Setup fees

For: the first month costs more than the ones after it. There is access to collect, backups and monitoring to set up, and a first full look at the site. A neglected site adds to that: WordPress's upgrade guide says to consider upgrading in steps when a site is more than two major releases behind.

Against: it is one more thing to agree before the client has seen any work.

The alternative is to price the catch-up as its own fixed job, done before the plan starts. Either way, keep the first month's extra cost out of the monthly price.

Raising a price for existing clients

Raise a price when the floor has moved: a license costs more, the site has gained plugins, the timed round takes longer than it did. Time the round again at least once a year so that you know.

To do it fairly:

Give written notice, at least as long as your agreement with the client promises.
State the new price, the date it starts, and what has changed in the work or in its cost.
Say how the client can end the plan if they do not accept it.

Grandfathering means keeping existing clients on the old price while new clients pay the new one. It rewards the clients who stayed, and it leaves those sites at the lowest price for good, whatever happens to their floor. A middle course is to hold the old price for a stated period, such as until the client's next renewal, and then move everyone. Never grandfather a price that is below the floor.

Which mistakes make a plan unprofitable?

Mistake	What it costs	The fix
"Unlimited edits"	The allowance becomes whatever the most demanding client asks for. The price is fixed and the cost is not.	An allowance in minutes, with a written rule for what happens after it.
Pricing from a competitor's page	Their price covers their costs, their list of work and their number of sites. You can see none of those.	Build the floor from your own timed round.
Forgetting licenses	Every renewal you pay comes out of the margin.	List each site's paid plugins, who holds each license, and when it renews.
Not pricing the bad month	One incident can use up a year of that site's margin.	An incident allowance spread over every site, or repairs quoted separately in writing.
One price for a store and a brochure site	The store's round is longer, and the price leaves that time unpaid.	A tier for stores, priced from a store's timed round.
Leaving out client email and the report	The plan is priced for the updates alone.	Log one month of it and add the minutes.

What about tax and contracts?

Both depend on where you are and where the client is. Whether tax is added to a care plan, and what an agreement has to say about notice, renewal and refunds, are different from one place to the next.

Nothing on this page is legal or tax advice. Ask an accountant before you send the first invoice.

Common questions

How much should I charge for a WordPress care plan?

More than the plan costs you in a bad month, and less than the upkeep is worth to the client. Work out the floor from one timed round, your tools and licenses, an allowance for incidents and your time on the client. No single figure fits, because both ends are different for every agency and every site.

What profit margin should a care plan have?

There is no standard figure to aim at, and a margin is only as real as the costs under it. Put your own hours into the care plan margin calculator, then run it again with the hours of a bad month. If the second result is a loss, the price is too low or the plan promises too much.

Should unused edit time roll over?

The simplest answer is no. Unused time ends with the month, and the plan says so. If you allow rollover, cap it at a stated amount, such as one month's allowance.

Should the price include hosting?

Keep hosting as a separate line. It is a cost that changes on someone else's schedule, and a plan that bundles it has to be repriced whenever the host's bill moves. A separate line also lets a client keep the plan when they change host.

Should I charge per site or per client?

Per site, because the work is per site. For a client with several sites, take off only the minutes that are shared, such as one contact and one invoice. Work out those minutes and discount them, and do not pick a percentage.