Rush fee
A surcharge for a compressed deadline or queue jump, priced for the disruption it causes to everything else you already committed to.
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What it is
A rush fee is a surcharge for compressing a timeline or jumping the queue, normally 25 to 100 percent on top of the standard fee. It is not a penalty for being disorganised and it is not opportunism. You are pricing the disruption: evenings and weekends, the other client whose date now slips, and the fact that fast work skips the slow reviews that keep quality steady.
Make the trigger objective so it never feels arbitrary. Anything requiring delivery inside your published lead time, or work confirmed with fewer than N business days of runway, carries the surcharge. Publish the standard lead time first, because a rush fee only makes sense relative to a normal speed people already know. State the percentage in the proposal rather than inventing it under pressure, and always offer the non-rush date alongside it. Shown both prices, some clients discover the standard timeline works fine after all, which tells you something useful about the deadline either way.
Two traps. Rush work is a common source of client-supplied delay: they pay the premium, then sit on approvals for four days and expect the date to hold anyway, so tie the fee to a matching turnaround commitment from them. And do not let rush pricing become your default revenue: if most projects are rush projects, your lead time is a fiction and your capacity planning is broken.
Ask AI for it
Write a rush fee policy and the client-facing language for a freelance service business. Define standard lead time as 10 business days from signed agreement and cleared deposit. Set the surcharge tiers: 25 percent for delivery in 6 to 9 business days, 50 percent for 3 to 5, 100 percent for 2 or fewer, calculated on the base project fee and invoiced in full upfront. Add a reciprocal condition: the client must return feedback and approvals within 24 hours, and if they miss it the rush deadline is void while the surcharge stays. Note that rush projects include one revision round instead of two, and that rush capacity is subject to availability and confirmed only in writing. Then give me a short email template for quoting a rush job that presents both options side by side: the standard date at the standard price and the rush date at the surcharged price, with no apology or hedging in the tone.