Should you bill clients for emails and calls? Count the time first

8 October 2026 · 6 min read

Yes, in some form. Email and calls with a client are part of the work, and if you do not charge for them the cost comes out of your rate without anyone having agreed to it. The real question is how: as a line on the invoice, as an allowance inside the fee, or built into a higher rate. Count a normal week first, because the right method depends on how big the number is.

Why this time goes missing

Communication is easy to leave off an invoice, for three reasons.

• It comes in pieces. A reply here, a quick call there, none of them long enough to feel like a billable event.
• It does not feel like the work. You were hired to design, write or build, so the hours that count in your head are the hours in the app you design, write or build with.
• It is awkward to list. A line that says “emails, 3.5 hours” invites a conversation that “design, 12 hours” does not.

None of that makes the time free. An hour spent reading a brief, answering questions about it and sitting on the kickoff call is an hour you could not sell to anyone else.

Count a normal week before you decide

You need one number: hours of client communication in an ordinary week. Guessing works badly here, because short, scattered tasks are exactly the ones memory shrinks.

1. Pick a week with no launch and no holiday in it.
2. Add up the time in your mail app, your chat app and your video call app for each day.
3. Add calls that happened on a phone. Your calendar and the phone’s list of recent calls cover those.
4. Subtract what was clearly not client work: newsletters, your own admin, a chat with a friend.

Step 2 is the hard one to do by hand. Punchcard does it without a timer. It notices which app is in front and prints a receipt at the closing time you set, with time per app and a day total, and a week roll prints on Sunday. If Mail and your call app are among your busiest apps, they are lines on the receipt with the minutes beside them. If you read mail in a browser, switching on “Itemize websites” in Settings prints the mail site as its own line (it works in several browsers, though not Safari; this post lists which).

Be clear about what that gives you. Punchcard records apps, and site names if you ask it to. It has no clients, no projects and no billable rates, so it can tell you that Mail took 4 hours 40 minutes this week, not that 3 of those hours belonged to one client. To split the total, open your Sent mailbox in Mail, choose View, then Sort By, then To, and look at the same week in Calendar. Ten minutes with those two and the receipts gets you close enough to price from.

Three ways to charge for it

Say the week comes to 7 hours 50 minutes of client communication (an example, not a benchmark). At $80 an hour that is about $627 of work. Here is how each method handles it.

Bill it as time. Calls and email go on the invoice at your normal rate, in the same increment as everything else. This is the most direct method and the natural one for hourly work. It needs a record you trust and a rounding rule you stated up front. How to round billable time covers the choice of increment.

Include an allowance. The fee covers a stated amount, such as two hours of calls and email a week, and anything beyond it is billed at your hourly rate. This suits fixed-price projects. The client knows what is included, and you have a sentence to point to when the fourth “quick call” of the week arrives.

Build it into the rate. You never list communication, and your rate is set high enough to carry it. If a quarter of your working week goes to client communication, the rate on the other three quarters has to pay for all of it. This method has the least friction and is the easiest to get wrong, because it only works if you measured the share and priced for it.

A rough guide: when the number is modest and steady, build it in. When it is large, or varies a lot from one client to the next, bill it or cap it, because one talkative client should not be subsidized by the quiet ones.

Say it before the work starts

Whichever method you pick, the client should read it before the first invoice, not on it. One or two plain sentences in the proposal or contract are enough:

• “Calls, email and meetings are billed at the hourly rate, in 15-minute increments.”
• “The fee includes up to two hours of calls and email per week. Additional time is billed at $80 an hour.”
• “The project fee includes two rounds of revisions and one weekly check-in call.”

Then describe the time usefully on the invoice. “Client communication: kickoff call, feedback review, six emails on the homepage copy” reads as work. “Emails” reads as padding.

If you are changing the terms for a client you already have, give notice and start with the next project or the next month. Do not go back and bill for calls that were free when they happened.

What the count usually changes

Once the number is written down, a few habits tend to shift. You stop answering within five minutes, because you can see what instant replies add up to. You move loose questions into one weekly call, which is easier to bill and easier to bound. And you quote the next fixed-price job with the communication inside it, not on top of it.

For the wider gap between time at the Mac and time on an invoice, see the difference between hours open and hours billed.

Tracking in Punchcard is free and does not expire, the first two receipts are free, and the CSV export (one row per session, with start, end, app and seconds) works without a license. Printing receipts after the first two needs the license, $9 once.

Questions

Is it normal to charge for emails?

It is common among professionals who bill by the hour, and many who work on fixed fees account for it through an allowance or their rate. What clients object to is a surprise, not the practice. State the rule up front and describe the time clearly.

Should I bill for a five-minute reply?

Not one at a time. Collect short replies into a daily or weekly line and bill the total in your normal increment. Charging a minimum increment for each short message is how a modest amount of work turns into an invoice the client disputes.

What about a call the client cancels at the last minute?

That is a cancellation policy, not a communication rate. If it happens often, add a sentence saying that calls canceled with less than a day’s notice are billed for the booked time.

Can a tracker bill this for me?

Punchcard cannot. It has no rates, no invoicing and no per-client tracking. It gives you the hours per app, which is the part memory gets wrong. The split by client and the invoice are still yours to do.