Let’s Get Candid About Keynote Speaking Fees!

By Crystal Washington, CSP, CPAE

I owe you an apology. As the person who introduced using “pineapples” in place of quoting actual numbers when I hosted the NSA podcast—I know you’re groaning—I think it’s time we have a candid discussion about speaker fees in 2025. First, I must share that I’m writing from the perspective of a full-time, paid keynote speaker who sells nothing in the back of the room. I also want to stress that I am sharing MY way and not THE way. In other words, there are numerous ways to achieve success in this business, and various business models exist. If your model differs from mine, please keep the information that serves you in this article and discard the rest. I also ask that you extend grace, as it’s necessary to create some generalizations in this article to provide actionable takeaways.

Why Now? Why Should I Listen to You?

Both are great questions! We must get serious about fees right now because:

1. Some speakers have still not recovered since the pandemic.
2. Some speakers are having to retool, rebrand, and reorganize due to the current federal administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and the implementation of deep budget cuts.
3. We’ve been witnessing a Dickensian split in the speaking business. “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” However, it seems like many speakers are only seeing one side, leaving them unaware of the possibilities.

Next is the uncomfortable (for me) answer as to why you should consider my offering. Since the COVID pandemic, I’ve more than doubled my already respectable fee. I’m not the only one; in fact, I know many keynote speakers, both within and outside of NSA, who have consistently increased their earnings per engagement since 2020, with some of their businesses more than doubling in revenue. We don’t often hear these stories because our peers are caring humans. Who in their right mind is going to run through a crowd of their friends who are experiencing challenges waving a flag that says, “I’m crushing it right now!?” But maybe we’re doing a disservice to the industry by not discussing those who are “winning” and specifically the strategies they’re using to attract increase.

Fee Levels

I categorize non-celebrity keynote speaker fees into four levels: emerging, business builder, strong salesperson, and consistently sought-after.

Emerging – This speaker has anywhere from zero to ten small-fee (think less than a mortgage payment) engagements per year. These speakers often speak locally, at small conferences, or for exposure. They may receive honorariums or a travel stipend. They regularly respond to calls for speaker proposals.

Business Builder – This speaker books, on average, 10 to 20 speaking engagements per year at a steady four-figure fee, mainly due to prospecting and some spin-off opportunities. They engage in extensive fee negotiation to keep their calendars full and attempt to speak at any venue where decision-makers are present, thereby increasing the chances of attracting additional business.

Strong Salesperson – This speaker is busy! They have 30+ five-figure speaking engagements per year. They typically have a strong sales process, sleek marketing, and generate spin-offs to keep their pipelines full. They may utilize an assistant, a team, or an external agency to assist in managing logistics.

Consistently Sought-After – This speaker rarely, if ever, negotiates the fee and has requests for more five-figure engagements than they have the time or energy to take on. They don’t prospect, and their business is almost always driven by word-of-mouth, spin-offs, and bureau business. They typically have longer booking windows and work with Fortune 500 companies and other large organizations that have sizeable budgets. This level is a “lifestyle business” where the speaker can craft the business around how they want to live.

To avoid stepping afoul of anti-trust laws, I will not post fee ranges. However, you can easily fill in the ranges for yourself with a bit of internet sleuthing or, honestly, by plugging the descriptions into ChatGPT or Google Gemini. Yes, I’m giving you permission to paste my intellectual property into generative AI… this time.

Factors Influencing Fee Levels

First, let’s start with what does not correlate with fee level: talent, domain expertise, and years in the business do not guarantee higher fee levels. TEDx Talks and books do not necessarily correlate with fee level. Gimmicks are not the same as strong branding and also do not correlate with fee level.

Whenever speakers at the beginning of their journey ask me about how they should set their fees, I always share that they should ask themselves the following questions.

1. Who is your target market? Are you primarily targeting corporate, association, nonprofit, government, education, empowerment conferences, or another type of market?
2. What is the range of what that market typically pays for speakers?
3. Is your topic already in demand in that market, and if so, how much will that market typically pay for your topic?
4. How much will the market pay YOU as the messenger of the topic, based on your reputation and brand?

The questions above are not a part of an amorphous esoteric exercise. Each of these questions can be answered with real number ranges. We may need to spend a little time looking online, asking our trusted bureau partners and other industry professionals, and comparing our profiles with those of our competitors’ eSpeakers profiles.

In the end, the following items influence fee:

• Chosen market
• Market conditions
• Demand for topic (you really don’t want to have to convince people that they need your topic)
• Speaker’s reputation (or lack thereof)
• Marketing materials
• Ability to generate spin-offs as a result of stage excellence
• Sales processes
• Ability to negotiate
• Operations processes
• Ability to SAY NO

How to Determine Your Fee

Imagine a mountain of a man drives up to your home in a sleek, black Chevy truck. He then proceeds to exit his vehicle, grab a package from his passenger seat, and walk up to your door, holding an unopened box with a 14″ MacBook Pro. He offers you a brand-new computer for $50! Do you buy it? Of course not! What’s wrong with it? What’s wrong with him? That’s precisely what clients think when we price ourselves too low, a common challenge when we first start our speaking businesses.

On the other end of the spectrum, some speakers boast that they are thirty, forty, or fifty thousand dollar speakers, yet they only secure one to two pieces of business a year at that fee. Call me nutty, but I think it would be better to be a super busy fifteen-thousand-dollar speaker, no? A thirty-thousand-dollar speaker with no business is not a thirty-thousand-dollar speaker; they are a zero-dollar speaker.

Our effective speaking fee is the sum of our speaking engagement fees for the last 12 months divided by the number of speaking events we had or our goal number, whichever is greater.

Example:
Speaker A’s fee is $7,500. He negotiates often, taking as little as $ 2,500. He booked 13 events last year, but his stated goal was 17 events. His revenue for the last 12 months was $73,000. His average fee per event is $5,615.38. However, if his goal is 17 events and he doesn’t reach it, his effective fee is $4,294.11. I would argue that he may want to consider lowering his fee to closer to his effective rate, allowing him to negotiate less and secure more engagements, which increases the opportunity for spin-offs. On the other hand, since he’s clearly on the Business Builder level, he may want to examine what he’s missing that can be found on the Strong Salesperson level: improved performance to generate spin, better marketing materials, and a more systematized sales process.

Essentially, our fee is the amount of money we can charge consistently, without much negotiation, while meeting our intended annual sales target.

How to Cross Levels

Now we’re getting to the good stuff! Do you want to increase your average or effective fee? It takes more than simply logging into eSpeakers and typing a different number in the fee space! Again, a speaker’s listed fee has nothing to do with what they actually get paid.

Below are actions that you can take to move between levels. Please note that our chosen target market and market conditions can impact our fee level. For instance, an education speaker is likely to encounter a budget wall with their market much sooner than a corporate speaker. That doesn’t make education undesirable, but we do need to be aware of the limitations of our choices. I’d also like to point out that while some clients are reducing their speaker budgets, others are increasing them, as they feel it’s more important than ever to have talented voices on stage. We need to be cognizant of overall economic and market trends, but those trends may not be reflected in our businesses. In other words, it is sometimes possible to buck negative trends.

Cross from Emerging to Business Builder

If a speaker wants to move between the Emerging fee level and Business Builder level, I suggest they do the following:

• Ensure your topic is currently in demand and that you are reflecting the market’s needs rather than just building a business around what you really want to say.
• Create a strong prospecting strategy.
• Strengthen negotiation skills and develop non-monetary concessions that add value to your business and make up for any gaps between client budgets and stated speaker fees.
• Ensure you have a polished website (five pages or less is fine), one sheet (no more than one page front and back), and a demo video (where you are on the kind of stage you want to be hired for—rent one if you have to or do a TEDx for footage).
• Look for opportunities to speak in front of groups where audience members are decision-makers who have the power to hire you. Local and state chapters of Meeting Professionals International, the American Society of Association Professionals, and the Society for Human Resource Management are just three examples of organizations that provide an opportunity to speak in front of people who can hire you.
• Get honest feedback from existing clients and strengthen your presentations (visuals, stage presence, etc.) to start seeing more spin business.
• Consider whether you need to tweak your personal style or brand.

Move from Business Builder to Strong Salesperson

The primary differences between a Business Builder and a Strong Salesperson are systems and reputation. To move from one area to another:

• Invest in and use speaker systems to manage your calendar and your contacts. I use eSpeakers and SpeakerFlow.
• Consider investing in and utilizing email marketing and referral systems, such as Constant Contact and Talkadot.
• Once the systems are in place, consider hiring an assistant or a firm that can manage non-revenue-generating activities within your business, allowing you to focus on sales and creating intellectual property.
• Upgrade your website, one sheet, and demo reel to reflect the feel of a brand at a higher fee level.
• Tweak your topic descriptions and content to reflect your target audience’s most pressing current needs based on popular Google Searches and industry news headlines.
• Become impeccable with after-event follow-up; ask clients if you’re a good fit for another of their events or another organization; immediately follow-up with any attendees who expressed interest in bringing you into their event. This follow-up should never be automated!

Cross from Strong Salesperson to Consistently Sought-After

Do you know what I’ve found to be the biggest differentiator between the Strong Salesperson and Consistently Sought-After fee level? The ability to say no.

I once heard the actor/singer Tyrese share a story on a podcast where he asked Vin Diesel how he made it into the twenty-million dollar club (as his per-movie rate). Vin looked at Tyrese and said, “It’s simple; I say no way more than I say yes.”

You may be thinking, “That’s ridiculous, Crystal.” Or is it? After I heard that podcast, I started thinking of the most successful speakers I knew and how firm they were in their pricing and travel requirements. My team and I decided to do a little experiment. The next time we received a request where the budget was under my fee, we’d say no (not offering to negotiate), state my fee again, and offer to connect them to another speaker. The first opportunity to practice this approach was easy, as the client only had half of my fee. We put our plan into action and declined. Much to our utter astonishment, the client “found” the other 50%!

These days, it’s pretty commonplace in my business for clients to find the money. Corporate clients with tight budgets, associations, and even nonprofits find the money. If they don’t, we happily refer them to a peer. We have an email template response already prepared for clients with wonderful futurist and technology speaker friends who charge a little less.

My second favorite Shakespeare quote is when Lady Macbeth tells her husband to “Screw your courage to the sticking place.” My first is from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where Hermia says, “Though she be but little she is fierce.” If you’ve seen me, you can guess why that one is my favorite. But I digress. My point is it takes a great deal of courage to play fee chicken with potential clients. You have to be willing to walk away if they don’t meet your number. In fact, at the Consistently Sought-After, you have to be willing to turn down hundreds of thousands of dollars of business that falls under your fee to achieve the target number of events at your listed fee. 

Indicators That it May Be Time to Up Your Fee

Increasing one’s fee should not be a decision based on ego. If a speaker is struggling to meet their goal number of events at one level, it would be completely illogical for them to increase their fee. The only exception to this would be if they’re offering their services at such a low price point that it repels paying clients.

Here’s when you should consider raising your fee:

1. You’re consistently receiving more event requests than your goal number of annual events at your fee level.
2. Your paying clients tell you that you are undercharging.
3. A bureau partner that you have already booked multiple events with tells you that they are confident that they can sell you at a higher fee.

Raising your fee does not automatically switch you to a higher fee level. You may move up within a level. As you seek to master each level, you’ll find yourself moving closer to the next!

Closing Thoughts

While this article focuses on speaker fees, I would like to conclude with the recognition that we are all in service to other humans. Andre 3000, in the song “Elevators,” says to a fan who told Andre that his life seemed glamorous:

True, I’ve got more fans than the average man

But not enough loot to last me

To the end of the week

I live by the beat

Like you live check-to-check

If you don’t move your feet

Then, I don’t eat

So we’re like neck-to-neck

That’s the speaking business, folks! Our ability to adjust our fees is mainly dependent on how well we serve our clients and audiences. All the action items shared ultimately result in our building more robust speaking businesses that serve from the moment someone types in an inquiry on Google or ChatGPT to the second we step off the stage.

Crystal Washington, CSP, CPAE, is a technology futurist who equips organizations with the knowledge they need to become “future-proof.” She’s a past board member of NSA and prior host of NSA’s podcast. These days, you can find Crystal at an airport near you, trying to get to a client, expertly navigating travel craziness with grace and humor.