How Much Does a Freelance Meta Ads Consultant Cost? (UK & EU Pricing Guide)

If you're weighing up hiring help for your Meta ads, the pricing question usually comes before every other question — and honestly, it should. Here's what the market actually looks like right now, and how I think about pricing my own work, so you have a real reference point either way.

What the market actually charges

Prices vary more than most guides admit. UK freelance specialists run anywhere from around £75 an hour up to £3,000+ a month for a full agency retainer. Boutique independent consultants commonly sit in the £500-£2,000/month range, small UK agencies £1,500-£5,000/month, and mid-market agencies climb to £5,000-£15,000/month. Day-rate freelancers with 2-5 years of experience typically charge somewhere between £280 and £490 a day.

That's a wide spread, and it's wide for a real reason: the number depends far less on your revenue than on how much genuine work your account needs, how experienced the person behind it is, and which pricing model they use.

The three common pricing models, and their trade-offs

• Hourly — makes sense for smaller accounts under roughly £2,000-5,000/month spend, where the actual workload doesn't justify a full retainer

• Percentage of ad spend — common at agencies (typically 10-20%), but it creates a quiet incentive problem: the more you spend, the more your consultant earns, whether or not that extra spend is actually earning its keep

• Flat monthly retainer — a fixed fee regardless of spend. This is what I use, specifically because it removes that incentive entirely. My fee doesn't change whether your account spends €3,000 or €10,000 a month — so there's never a reason for me to push you toward spending more than the account genuinely needs.

Where I sit, and what's actually included

I work with accounts spending roughly €3,000-10,000+ a month, at a fixed monthly retainer in the €5,000-20,000 range depending on scope. That covers strategy, most of the day-to-day execution, ad copy (I have a copywriting team, though clients are always welcome to write their own), and genuine involvement beyond just the ads themselves — feedback on landing pages and offers, and help shaping the funnel where it's useful, not just campaigns running in isolation.

You keep your own ad account and your own billing throughout — I work through agency access, and your card covers the actual ad spend directly with Meta. That means your pixel history and audience data stay yours permanently, even years down the line, regardless of what happens with our working relationship.

A realistic timeline, not an inflated one

Most new accounts take somewhere around 8-12 weeks to show real, stable results — not because anything's going slowly, but because that's genuinely how long it takes for a Meta account to gather enough data and settle into consistent delivery. Anyone promising dramatically faster is either working with an account that already had strong existing data, or setting an expectation that won't hold up.

The lowest quote isn't the cheapest option if it comes with a percentage-of-spend incentive working quietly against you. The right price is the one attached to a model that's actually aligned with your results, not just your spend.

If you're still weighing consultant against agency against doing it yourself, this comparison walks through the real trade-offs of each, and

If any of this sounds like the fit you're looking for, the site's contact form or a direct email is the easiest way to start that conversation.