The clearest public window into consulting prices is the United States federal government. Firms that sell to it file rate schedules with the General Services Administration, and those filings put a McKinsey senior partner at $1,193.57 an hour and an engagement manager at $834.40, per the 2024 schedules compiled by Slideworks in April 2026. The same review found BCG's filed senior partner rate at $1,116.17 an hour and its associates at $404.18. Commercial rates are rarely published anywhere, which is why buyers end up doing archaeology in procurement filings to get a defensible number.
At the other end of the market, independent consultants quote anything from double-digit hourly rates to four-figure day rates. The range is enormous. The spread has structural causes, and knowing them is the fastest way to avoid overpaying, or underbuying.
Why the range is this wide
Most of a large firm's price has little to do with the person in front of you. The classic model is a pyramid: a partner sells the work, a manager runs it, and a team of analysts does the day-to-day production, each billed at a multiple of their salary so that the engagement carries offices, research staff, recruiting, training and the partner pool. This is the leverage model, the industry's engine for over a century, and it is how a firm can field hundreds of people on a programme at once. A senior-only boutique inverts the shape: no junior layer to bill, little overhead to carry, so the same fee buys far more experienced hours. The federal schedules make the arithmetic visible. A big-firm analyst's filed rate sits between $327.41 and $498.23 an hour, and the gap between that figure and the analyst's salary is the structure around them.
The formats you will actually be quoted
A study by Consulting Success of nearly 1,000 consultants across more than 75 countries found project-based fees the most common at 30%, hourly at 29%, monthly retainers at 16%, value-based fees at 15% and day rates at 10%. Each format allocates risk differently.
- Hourly and day rates are simple and auditable, and they leave scope risk with you: the meter runs whether or not the work converges.
- Fixed project fees shift delivery risk to the firm, which is why they arrive with tightly written scopes and change clauses.
- Retainers buy availability and continuity, and suit ongoing advisory better than defined builds.
- Value-based fees tie the bill to the outcome rather than the clock, and demand a number both sides actually believe.
Whatever the format, the useful habit is the same: translate the quote back into senior hours. Divide the fee by the days of experienced attention it actually buys, and a retainer, a fixed fee and a day rate suddenly become comparable. It takes five minutes and it changes negotiations.
How much does a business consultant usually cost?
There is no single market rate, and anyone handing you one figure is compressing too much. What exists are bands by structure. At the top, Slideworks' review of public US contracts found McKinsey engagements ranging from $1.66 million to $7.92 million, and a Bain federal schedule pricing a small team, three consultants plus half a manager's time, at about $110,554 a week. Below that sit boutiques and independents, where a defined piece of strategy work is typically quoted as a fixed fee or a set of day rates, and where public data thins out fast. If a figure matters to your decision, ask the firm to show its arithmetic: who is on the team, at what rate, for how many days. A firm that prices seriously can answer in minutes.
The fee is a structure before it is a number. Ask what the hour has to carry.
Is $100 an hour good for consulting?
It depends what sits behind the hour. Run the arithmetic on the seller's side: an independent billing $100 an hour who sells 25 hours a week for 46 weeks grosses $115,000 a year, before tax, insurance, software and every unpaid hour of admin and sales. That is a decent living in many fields and thin for a veteran with rare expertise, which is why $100 usually signals someone early in their practice, a lower-cost specialty, or a junior layer inside a bigger structure. None of those is a problem if it matches the job. The mismatch to avoid is expecting partner-grade judgment at that price. Its mirror image is just as costly: dismissing a $400 rate as expensive when it arrives with no pyramid underneath it and twenty years of pattern recognition inside it.
Will a consultant actually help my business?
Sometimes. The honest answer is that the outcome is mostly decided before the contract is signed: by whether the problem is real, whether the person who diagnosed it will do the work, and whether anyone owns what happens after the recommendation lands. Before signing, get answers to five things.
- Who exactly does the work, by name, and how many senior hours the estimate contains.
- What happens after the recommendation: who builds it, and whether that sits inside the fee or in a follow-on proposal.
- How success is measured, with a number and a date attached.
- How many hours a week your own people must contribute, because internal time is the hidden half of every consulting cost.
- Two references from companies roughly your size.
One irritation we cannot resolve for you: almost nobody in this industry publishes prices, ourselves included, because a number without its scope misleads more than it informs. The federal filings quoted above are the rare exception, which is why they are worth knowing about. For everything else, your protection is the five questions, asked before the signature.