Fractional COO rates: what it costs, and what mine are.
Most pages on this subject quote a range and then ask you to book a call to find out what you'd pay. Here's the range, what actually moves it, how it compares to hiring a full-time COO — and then my own prices, in numbers, on this page.
What does a fractional COO cost?
Fractional COO rates typically run $3,000 to $15,000 per month on a retainer, or roughly $150 to $350 per hour. Most founder-led businesses between $500K and $10M in revenue land between $3,000 and $8,000 a month. A full-time COO costs $200,000 to $400,000-plus a year once you count salary, bonus, benefits, payroll taxes and equity.
The range is wide because "fractional COO" covers everything from a few advisory hours a month to a near-full operating engagement. Which is why the range on its own is close to useless. What you want to know is where you'd sit in it, and that comes down to four things.
What actually moves your number
- How many days a month. The obvious one, and the least interesting. Two days a month and eight days a month are different purchases.
- Building the systems, or running them. Building costs more and should end. Running is cheaper and continues. If nobody tells you which one you're buying, you're probably buying the expensive one indefinitely.
- How much is already written down. The big one, and the one nobody quotes on. If how the business decides lives in your head, the first job is extraction, and that work has to happen before anything else can. Undocumented businesses cost more to operate on — not because the operator charges more, but because there's more to do.
- Accountable, or advising. Someone with decision rights who owns an outcome prices differently from someone giving you their opinion on a monthly call. Both are legitimate. Only one of them changes what happens on Tuesday.
The four ways it gets billed
Monthly retainer — $3,000–$15,000
The most common structure. You buy a defined block of executive time and system-building each month. Simple to budget. Ask what happens to unused time and what the notice period is, because that's where retainers go wrong.
Hourly — $150–$350
Used for lighter or advisory work. Straightforward, and it rewards spending more hours — the opposite of what you want from an operations hire, whose job is to make the business need less of them.
Fixed price per deliverable
A scoped piece of work, priced as a thing rather than a timesheet. The fee ties to the outcome, you know the number before you start, and the risk of it running long sits with the operator instead of you. This is how I work.
Versus full-time — $200K–$400K+
Salary is only the visible part. Add bonus, benefits, payroll taxes, equity, and the cost of a bad hire in a senior seat. At the common $3,000–$8,000 a month, a fractional engagement runs $36K–$96K a year.
There is no fractional COO salary
It's a common search, and the answer is that the category doesn't exist. A fractional COO is engaged, not employed. No salary, no benefits load, no payroll taxes, no severance, no three-month ramp, no redundancy conversation if the business changes shape. You're buying an operating result on terms you can scale up or down.
That cuts both ways, and it's worth being clear-eyed about it: an engaged operator has less skin in the game than an employee with equity, and can leave more easily. What you should want in exchange is everything written down as you go, so that if they do leave, what they built stays.
My prices, since you're here to find a number
Published rather than quoted after a discovery call. Every step credits into the next, and none of them require a meeting to find out what they cost.
The Read — $450
A recorded walkthrough of your site and a ranked memo of fixes, in two business days. No meeting. Credits toward the Map. About the Read →
The Map — $1,999
Three 90-minute sessions over three weeks that extract how your business runs and put it on paper, with a fixed-price build proposal as the last page. Credits in full toward a build within 60 days. About the Map →
The Autopilot — from $899/mo
The monthly operating rhythm on the website itself. $899 a month on the site you have, $3,000 on a site we built. Cancel any time. About the Autopilot →
The Seat — From $6,000/mo
The ongoing seat itself, six-month minimum. This is the line item that compares directly to a fractional COO retainer, and it sits in the middle of the market range. About the Seat →
The build itself — the Site — is fixed-price and scoped from your Map, because quoting a build before knowing what the business needs is how both sides end up unhappy. The price arrives as the final page of your Operating Memo, and you're free to take it elsewhere.
Why publish any of this
Because the alternative wastes both our time. Gating a number behind a call means the call is a qualification exercise, and you already know that walking into it. If $6,000 a month is wrong for you, you should be able to find that out in eight seconds on a page rather than forty minutes on a video call.
It's also the same argument this whole site makes about operations: the things a business won't write down are usually the things costing it most. Pricing is just the easiest place to demonstrate it. If I won't put my own numbers on a page, it's fair to wonder what else stays in my head.
Work out what you'd actually need
If you don't yet know whether you need a few days a month or a full rebuild, the Map is the cheapest way to find out. Three sessions, $1,999, and it ends with a written memo and a fixed-price proposal — both of which are yours whether or not you build with me.
About the Map →For the role itself — what a fractional COO does, who it's for, how it compares to interim and outsourced — see fractional COO services or the short version, what is a fractional COO.