Logo Designer Salary Averages: How Much Can You Make?

Working as a logo designer, you’ll get to exercise your creativity, work on a wide variety of projects and help shape companies’ branding. Plus, you can potentially earn a highly attractive income.

Read on as we explore the typical logo designer salary along with the factors that will affect it.

How Much Do Logo Designers Make?

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) is the most authoritative source of salary information across the US. It doesn’t list logo designers as a specific career. However, it does contain salary data for related industries.

In May 2021, graphic designers across the US earned on average $50,710 per year or $24.38 per hour. Most graphic designers earned between $31,310 and $98,260 annually.

Graphic designers working in advertising and public relations saw a slightly above-average median salary of $52,050. Meanwhile, those offering specialized design services (such as logo design) earned on average $58,610. This is an increase of over 15%.

The reality, however, is that some logo designers make significantly less than this — and some significantly more.

What Factors Affect the Typical Logo Designer Salary?

Numerous factors will affect the salary that you can expect to earn as a logo designer. These include:

Freelance vs In-House

As an in-house logo designer, you’ll benefit from a stable income along with benefits and job security. If you go freelance, however, your income might fluctuate according to market demand and how successful your marketing efforts are.

Less established freelancers with fewer clients may have a low annual salary, even if their hourly rate is still reasonable. More experienced freelancers, meanwhile, can earn significantly more. In fact, a 2021 report from Upwork found that 44% of freelancers earned more than they did when working in-house.

Types of Clients

Custom-built logos can be purchased for as little as $5 on the online freelance marketplace Fiverr, while big brands often pay millions of dollars for them.

The result is that some logo design agencies and freelancers have a smaller revenue with lower profit margins and a business model based on a high number of clients. This may place an upper ceiling on your earnings, however. Take the $5 logo from Fiverr: even without considering platform fees, expenses, and time spent messaging, you would have to create five logos an hour to earn the BLS’s average wage.

Alternatively, some logo designers and agencies take on a smaller number of clients but focus on delivering high-quality products. Depending on how the business is set up, this could lead to a higher overall income. That said, you shouldn’t overlook how much more time-consuming this type of work can be.

Experience

Many logo designers can directly link their years of experience to their salary. Online jobs board Indeed collates user-reported anonymous salary data. Based on over 7,000 reported salaries, it calculates that graphic designers with over ten years of experience earn 42.17% more per hour than graphic designers with less than a year of experience.

Experience isn’t just about how long you’ve been working, however. By taking on a wider range of projects, you’ll hone your skills and be able to negotiate higher rates — and that’s true whether you’re an in-house logo designer or freelance.

Location

Logo design is increasingly a remote-friendly industry. Many professionals, especially freelancers, can work at home with clients from all over the world.

However, location can still affect your earning potential as a logo designer. Being based in a city with networking events will open up valuable business opportunities for you. And if you prefer to work in-house at a marketing or graphic design agency, you may find your bosses prefer you to come into the office. In that case, your location could determine how much you can earn.

For example, Indeed’s data found that graphic designers in Massachusetts earn 25% more than the national average. In Alabama, however, salaries dropped by 28%. And although graphic designers in California only earned 3% more than the average salary nationwide, Los Angeles is the highest-paying city in the country for graphic designers.

Design Skills

The better your design skills, the more you can expect to earn. There are two main ways you can improve your design skills and, in doing so, command a higher logo designer salary:

• Polish your existing skills so that you can improve the quality of the work you’re already doing
• Expand your skills so you can take on a wider range of logo design work; this could be through practicing new styles and techniques or learning how to use additional programs

Of course, once you’ve improved your design skills, you then need to demonstrate this to your employer or potential clients. That brings us to the next factor determining affecting your pay:

Portfolio Quality

Your portfolio, along with your logo designer resume, is key to negotiating better rates. As an in-house employee, you’ll use it to ask for a higher starting salary. Plus, you can point to it in annual reviews and leverage it for pay rises.

Alternatively, if you’re a freelance logo designer, you’ll show potential new clients your portfolio before they sign up for your services. With an excellent portfolio, you’ll be able to attract higher-paying clients and charge more for your services.

Negotiating Skills

Negotiating a better rate can significantly boost your lifetime earnings. It often has a cumulative effect, as future pay rises or freelance rate increases are typically done as a percentage increase of your existing salary.

Set Yourself up for Financial Success as a Logo Designer

Achieving a higher salary as a logo designer comes down to many factors: your design skills, the quality of your portfolio, the company and clients you work for, whether you’re freelance or in-house, your experience level and location.

One of the easiest things to improve, however, is your resume. A polished and professional resume will help you achieve a higher annual income, whether you’re working in-house or freelance. As an employee, you can use your resume to negotiate higher salaries. If you’re freelance, meanwhile, you can upload your resume to your website and use it to justify higher rates, alongside your portfolio.

Your resume needs to highlight your professional accomplishments as well as your skill sets. Plus, it should be machine-readable and attractively laid out, so that the reader has trust in your design skills.

Creating a professional resume doesn’t have to be time-consuming. We have several logo designer resume templates that you can use as a starting point. Each one is machine-readable and easy to customize to your brand, professional background and potential employer or client.

Plus, our resume builder will automatically suggest the ideal structure based on your background, along with recruiter-approved phrasing for key design skills.

Build your logo designer resume in minutes, so you can confidently negotiate higher rates.