How to Write A Freelance Contract: Clauses, Tips, And Templates

A freelance contract is an agreement that stipulates all the necessary conditions from responsibility scope to deadlines and payments. This document protects the rights of both parties and ensures a productive collaboration — as long as you write it the right way. 

Read our guide to learn how to write a freelance contract from what should be in it to why you need it in the first place.

Why Do I Need to Write a Freelance Contract?

Let’s say, you were hired to write a couple of SEO blog articles like this one. The scope of work is quite small, isn’t the chat history enough to establish rates, deadlines, and all the rest? In most cases, not really.

Here’s how signing a freelance contract can benefit you as a freelance worker:

• You’ll know what to do when things go south. For example, when your employer keeps postponing payments for the work submitted a month ago or forces you to pay for a content marketing tool you need for the project, a contract puts you in a position of power. If you have a contract on your hands, you can say “No, it’s not what’s written down in the legal document” — and protect yourself from unwanted conditions.
• Legal battles will be easier. If you end up in court protecting your right to get the well-deserved payments, you’ll have solid proof that you worked for them on certain written conditions. That way, you’re more likely to win a lawsuit against the scammy client.
• You’ll establish clearer IP conditions. A freelance contract will protect you from intellectual property theft and, for example, make sure you’ll be able to use the project in your portfolio if that’s important to you.

Key Clauses to Include in the Freelance Contract

Let’s take a closer look at what to include in the freelance contract, regardless of the industry and other project details.

Project Scope

The project scope establishes the expectations in the freelancer-employer relationships early on. It ensures that you’ll get the expected work completed by certain dates and the freelancer has the right to reject the off-schedule tasks.

Here are the details worth including:

• Timeframe — contract start and end dates, as well as in-between deadlines
• Volume — the full list of project-related tasks, or, if it’s ongoing, the established number of tasks completed over a period (e.g. “two blog articles a month”)
• The expected result — a description of what counts as completed work, for example, a finalized article after all the comment iterations or a submitted draft

Payment Terms

The payment terms you should mention in the contract include:

• Rates — monthly fixed rates, hourly, or varying fees per each completed task
• Schedule — on delivery, on certain dates or days a week, possible delay intervals, and whatever is convenient for both parties
• Method — wire transfer, virtual wallets like PayPal, or payroll services like Solowise
• Requisites — depending on the method, these could be debit card data, crypto wallet address, etc.

Ownership Rights

This clause is related to copyright law and establishes who owns your work once it’s submitted, which is especially relevant for creative specialists like photographers or writers. It answers questions like:

• Can you republish the work somewhere else or reuse it?
• Can you add the project to your portfolio?
• What can your client do with your work after you submit it?

For example, if you’re writing an e-book for a client, this clause specifies whether you’re a ghostwriter or an actual author with your name on the cover. If you’re an author, you’ll be able to print and sell the book — or, if your client does the printing and publishing work themselves, you’re entitled to royalties. Meanwhile, if you’re a ghostwriter, once you finish the book and get paid, it’s no longer yours. The client receives the royalties, you can’t prevent them from printing the book or altering its content if you don’t want to, and so on.

Indemnity Clause 

Imagine that you just started working with a new client but then two weeks in, out of the blue and right around your payday, they write you a message: “We cut the budgets, the project is over, none of your finished work or further services are needed, I’m not paying you for anything”. For unlikely events like this one, you need an indemnity clause.

This clause answers the following questions:

• Who is responsible for emergencies leading to the contract violation?
• How does one party compensate the other?

If you have an indemnity clause in your contract, you’ll still be entitled to fees for your work even if your client suddenly terminates the project due to budget cuts.

Termination Clause

Sometimes nothing goes wrong but you just can’t or don’t want to work with this client anymore, meanwhile, the project is still unfinished. For such cases, including a termination clause will help a lot. Unlike the indemnity clause, it regulates termination not because of emergencies but in more peaceful “I’m tired of their vague comments” kind of conditions. 

The termination clause regulates what both you and the employer should do in case of early termination decided mutually or by either of the parties.

Changes and Revisions

Revisions are a normal part of work — however, if you don’t add this clause, you may end up doing dozens of comment iterations for free. If you want to protect yourself, include the clause dedicated to changes and revisions that specifies:

• The more specific definitions of what is considered a “revision round” 
• The “acceptable” number of revision rounds
• The “acceptable” depth of changes (for example, there’s a difference between changing one button color and rebuilding the entire website from scratch using a different tech stack)
• The hourly rate for edits and the conditions that require extra payment for edits

How to Write a Freelance Contract: Tips and Best Practices

Now that you know what must be included in a freelance contract, let’s check out some tips that will help you write your first-ever freelance contract headache-free.

Tip #1: Use a Template

A freelance contract template will help you conquer the “blank page anxiety”, create the document a lot faster, and ensure that all the necessary clauses are in place. Here are some templates we like:

• LegalTemplates
• The template by Ryan Robinson
• Jotform
• The template for Notion from Legalstuffdocs

Payroll services for freelancers offer contract templates too. For example, Solowise has templates for monthly or one-time fixed payments, and also for hourly rates — that’s enough to cover all your freelance needs!

Tip #2: Be Specific and Thorough

If the contract has a loophole or an unclear definition, it may be used by the client and you won’t get the necessary protection from it since it’s technically your fault. Here’s what to pay attention to:

• The definitions of everything. The project scope, the deliverables, the edits and rounds of edits — even if you feel like “I know what an article is, it’s obvious”, you need to define even the simplest, most mundane terms.
• The deadlines and milestones. Everything that can be time-bound in your contract should be time-bound: no matter if it’s the timeline of the project or the payment deadlines.
• Communication boundaries. One important detail worth including in the contract is the boundaries like your availability hours and preferred means of communication with the client (email, certain messengers, phone, video conferencing, and so on). These are not just necessary for work-life balance but also bring more clarity to the workflow, which benefits the client too.

Tip #3: Get Legal Advice if You Can

Some of the clauses we mentioned can be tricky to write by yourself — for example, copyright law can be very convoluted for those who don’t work in the legal niche and don’t have experience in creating contracts.

While the contract itself is relatively easy to write without external help, we suggest asking a lawyer for help with particularly complex clauses. 

Other Good-to-Have Documents for Freelancers

A freelance contract is not the only document you can make use of. Here are other papers that may help you in your career advancements:

• An NDA agreement. A non-disclosure agreement is a document that protects the sensitive information shared between the parties during the project. The sensitive information can include “secret recipes”, strategies and plans for future product releases, customer lists, and so on. If you’re willing to sign an NDA agreement, it shows that you’re a serious and committed professional — you’ll make a good impression early on. And in some cases, not signing an NDA agreement means not being hired for the project. Also, NDA provisions may be a part of your freelance contract.
• A proposal. Sometimes when clients don’t come to you, you come to potential clients — and that’s where a proposal can help. A proposal is a document that describes the project you’re pitching in great detail from the full scope of work to the pricing and timeline, the “why”, and even testimonials and case studies from your past clients.
• A price quote. A price quote is a spreadsheet of what you can do for a client and the corresponding hourly or fixed rates per task. If you have this one on your hands, you ease the evaluation and budgeting processes both for you and your client. 

Wrapping up

Having a freelance contract on your hands even for the smallest projects is a way to establish clearer expectations in your client-worker relationships and save yourself from future problems, including lawsuit risks and intellectual property theft. We made a list of all the necessary clauses to add to your contract, from project scope to termination conditions. For some of these clauses, like ownership rights, you may need to catch up with a lawyer, while others are pretty easy to write yourself.

The easiest way to write a freelance contract is to use a ready-made template — we included a list of the most reliable freelance contract templates we found online. If it’s your first time writing a contract, don’t be scared, it’s easier than it seems, and we wish you the best of luck!

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