The Rate Nobody Has Reviewed
A rate that has not moved in four years is not a saving, and the conversation that would have moved it is one both sides avoid for different reasons.
Reads as a businessReads as employmentCuts both waysDepends where you are
Four factors, and no total. Every bar is the same length: the side is the claim, the size is not. Nothing here was decided; it accumulated, which is how most of these arrangements change.
A rate that has not moved in four years is not a saving. It is a supplier who has been getting quietly poorer in real terms, and a relationship accumulating a resentment that will arrive all at once.
The commercial issue in “The Rate Nobody Has Reviewed” is easier to resolve when scope, time and approval records can be checked by both parties. When reviewing read the provider’s workflow outline for remote desktop monitoring software, use those records to reconcile delivery and invoicing, while keeping tax status and contractual remedies with the people responsible for them.
The conversation that would have moved it is avoided by both sides, for different reasons, which is why it does not happen.
A broader benchmark for “The Rate Nobody Has Reviewed” is available through Kanban University guidance. Use it alongside the brief and day-to-day facts so general guidance supports rather than replaces case-specific judgement.
Why the supplier does not ask
Because asking carries risk they cannot afford. A supplier who depends on your work believes, often correctly, that raising the rate puts the relationship in play.
The longer an engagement has run without a review, the harder asking becomes, because the request now implies that the last three years were underpaid.
Why the buyer does not offer
Because nothing prompts it. Employee salaries move through an annual process that exists; contractor rates sit in a purchase order that nobody reopens.
There is also a quiet assumption that a supplier who has not asked is content, which is true of almost nobody.
What the silence actually costs
Three things, and the money is the smallest. You lose the discipline of looking at the engagement at all. You accumulate an unspoken grievance. And you gradually arrive at a supplier who feels undervalued and dependent at the same time, which is the combination that produces claims.
Replacing somebody who knows your systems costs considerably more than the rise would have.
Running the review
It does not need a process. Once a year, for each engagement that has run more than a year:
- What has the rate been, and since when?
- What has changed in the work, in scope or in difficulty?
- What would this cost to buy now, from somebody new?
- Agree a figure, or agree that it stays, and say which.
Twenty minutes. The fourth point matters: deciding that the rate stays is a decision and should be said out loud, which is quite different from nobody mentioning it.
Finding out what it would cost now
The honest benchmark is what you would pay a new supplier of the same quality today, which most businesses have not checked in years.
It is usually obtainable: quotes for a comparable piece of work, recruiters who cover the trade, or simply asking a supplier you do not use. The number is often uncomfortable and that discomfort is the information.
What a rise is not
It is not a reward for good service, it is not an annual increment, and it is not performance-related. Each of those framings belongs to employment and each of them appears in buyers' language without anybody meaning anything by it.
The commercial framing is simple: this is what the work is worth now, and this is what we have agreed to pay for it.
The supplier who asks for a large one
Usually the result of four years of nobody asking. The request arrives as a step change because the small annual conversations never took place.
The useful response is not to treat it as opportunism but to establish what the correct current figure is, and then to agree a review cycle so that it does not happen this way again.
Reducing a rate
Occasionally the honest answer, when the work has become simpler or the volume has grown considerably.
It is a negotiation, not an instruction, and it may be declined. A buyer who imposes a reduction and expects it to be accepted has forgotten what kind of relationship this is, and will usually find out within a quarter.
Volume, and the rate that reflects it
A supplier with a guaranteed stream of work can reasonably charge less per unit than one taking occasional pieces, because their utilisation risk is lower.
That is a legitimate commercial trade and worth making explicitly. It is also worth noticing what has been traded: a lower rate in exchange for continuity is one of the small steps by which an engagement becomes something closer to a retainer, and then to a position.
Inflation, which nobody mentions
A rate held flat for four years has fallen in real terms by whatever the period produced, and in several recent years that figure has been substantial.
Suppliers feel this acutely and buyers do not see it at all, because on your side the number on the invoice has not changed. Saying it out loud — we know this has not moved and prices have — costs nothing and changes the character of the conversation entirely.
The effect of having the conversation at all
Beyond the money, it reinstates the thing that long engagements lose: a moment at which both sides deliberately look at the arrangement.
In a collection largely about drift, an annual conversation about price is the cheapest available mechanism for noticing that anything has changed, and it is the one almost nobody has.