How much deposit to ask for on a freelance project

A deposit is not a trust signal. It is the part of the work you cannot get back if the project stops.

The short answer

Set the deposit to cover the cost you cannot recover if the client stops after week one - research, setup, booked time.
For short projects, a single upfront percentage is simpler than milestones. For long ones, tie payments to deliverables you can point at.
Never let the unpaid balance exceed the work you would be willing to lose.
State the deposit, the milestones and what pauses work in the same paragraph as the price.
Start after the deposit clears, not after it is promised.

Working out your number

List what you do before the first deliverable: discovery, setup, research, scheduling other work away.
Value those hours at your rate. That is your unrecoverable cost.
Divide by the project total to get the minimum deposit percentage, and round up.
For a project longer than about six weeks, split the remainder into milestones attached to named deliverables.
Check the worst case: if the client stops the day after a milestone, is the unpaid work small enough to absorb?

Structures that hold up

Short project: a deposit upfront, the balance on delivery, before files transfer.
Medium project: deposit, one midpoint deliverable, balance on delivery.
Long project: deposit plus monthly milestones with a named output each month, so no month is unpaid.
Retainer: paid at the start of the period it covers, not at the end.

The mechanics people forget

Put the deposit on its own invoice with its own number and due date, so part-payment is visible rather than inferred from a bank balance.
Say what the deposit buys in plain terms - the discovery phase, the booked weeks - so it reads as a purchase rather than a levy.
Name the pause condition: work stops if a milestone invoice is more than a stated number of days late. Write it before you need it.
Keep the final file transfer behind the final payment, and say so at the quote stage rather than at delivery.

When a client pushes back

Large organisations often have fixed payment terms and cannot pay a deposit at all. That is a real constraint, not a red flag - but it changes your risk, so price and structure accordingly: smaller first phase, named deliverable, and a written pause clause.

For everyone else, the useful reply is not a defence of the percentage. It is a smaller first phase with its own price, so the commitment they are being asked to make is smaller too.

The free tool for this

A project price from the work you actually listed - A project price from the work you actually listed. It runs in the page, asks for your own numbers, and sends nothing anywhere.

If you would rather not build it yourself

Calc Pack's quote and fee calculators turn this into arithmetic you can show a client: hours, rate, milestones and what the platform fees leave behind. Freelance Rate & Pricing Calculators - 8 Excel Tools (Calc Pack) is $12. See it on the shop, and there is a plain page about it here: what it holds.

Questions people actually ask

Is fifty per cent too much to ask?

Not if your unrecoverable work justifies it. The honest test is what you would lose if the project stopped early, not what feels polite.

What if they want to pay everything at the end?

Then reduce the size of the first phase until the amount at risk is one you can absorb, and put the pause condition in writing.