The 6 clauses every freelance contract needs

A good freelance contract isn't long, and it isn't written in dense legalese. It's short, plain, and clear on the handful of things that actually cause trouble between a freelancer and a client. Get those right and the document does its job — which is less about winning a dispute than about quietly preventing one.

If you've ever wondered whether you even need a written contract, the short version is that you're rarely required to have one — an oral contract is, in HMRC's words, "no less legally binding than a written contract" — but you almost always should, because a written agreement is what proves what was agreed. This guide goes a step further: the six clauses that earn their place in nearly every freelance agreement, and what each one should say.

A quick note first: TrustSolo isn't a law firm, and nothing here is legal advice. Its contract templates are customisable starting points, not solicitor-reviewed documents — for a high-value or unusual engagement, a professional opinion is worth having.

1. Scope of work

Scope is the clause that prevents more grief than any other, because "I assumed that was included" is where most freelance disputes begin. A good scope clause says plainly what you're delivering — the pieces, the formats, the number of concepts or drafts — and, just as importantly, states that anything outside it is additional work, agreed and quoted separately.

That second half is the one people forget, and it's the half that keeps your time from quietly leaking away. Without it, a project grows a task at a time until you're doing far more than you priced for. With it, extra requests become a normal, businesslike "happy to — here's the cost for that."

2. Payment terms

This clause is where you get paid, so it's worth being precise. It should set out the fee and how it's structured (fixed, hourly or a day rate), any deposit taken up front, and — crucially — when payment is due, expressed as a number of days and turned into a concrete date on each invoice.

It's also the natural home for your position on late payment — and the right wording depends on who your client is, which is easy to miss. Where you invoice businesses, a line noting that overdue invoices may attract statutory interest is enough, because the law already entitles you to interest and recovery costs and the clause is really just putting the client on notice.

Where your clients are private individuals — as they are for most tutors and photographers — that same line does nothing, because those statutory rights apply between businesses. Any interest has to be agreed in the contract itself, so this is the clause that has to carry it. Keep the rate modest: under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 an unfair term "is not binding on the consumer", and the Act's list of terms that may be regarded as unfair includes one requiring a consumer to pay "a disproportionately high sum in compensation". A rate you'd be comfortable explaining is far likelier to survive than a punitive one.

Our guides to invoicing and late-paying clients cover the mechanics in full.

3. Intellectual property and ownership

For any creative or written work, this is the most important commercial term in the contract: who owns the finished work, and when. A common and sensible arrangement is that ownership transfers to the client on full payment — which neatly means they don't own the work until they've paid for it. Alternatively, you keep the copyright and grant a licence for agreed uses.

Either is fine, but it has to be decided and written down. "I assumed I owned it" is one of the more expensive assumptions in freelancing, and it cuts both ways — a client who thinks they own something they've only licensed, or a freelancer who's given away rights they meant to keep.

4. Revisions and changes

Creative work can always be nudged a little further, and without a limit, "just one more tweak" becomes a dozen unpaid ones. This clause sets how many rounds of revisions the fee includes (two is a common starting point), what counts as a revision versus a new direction, and your rate for anything beyond.

The key distinction to spell out is that a change of mind — a new brief, a different direction — is new work, not a revision. That single sentence is what keeps a fixed-fee project from quietly turning into an open-ended one.

5. Termination and cancellation

Projects sometimes end early — a client changes direction, budgets get cut, priorities shift. This clause decides what happens when they do: whether either side can end the agreement with a period of notice, or whether a kill fee applies to compensate you for work done and time set aside. It should also make clear that work already completed is paid for.

The aim isn't to trap a client into continuing; it's to make sure that if they walk away mid-project, you're not left absorbing the cost of time you'd blocked out for them. A fair cancellation clause spares both sides an awkward, improvised conversation at a bad moment.

6. Confidentiality

In the course of the work you'll often see things a client would rather keep private — figures, plans, customer details, logins. A confidentiality clause simply commits you to keeping that information to yourself, using it only for the work, and not passing it on. For some kinds of work — anything touching personal data or sensitive systems — it matters a great deal, and clients increasingly expect it as standard.

It reassures the client that their information is safe with you, which is quietly good for winning the kind of work where trust is the whole point.

A clear agreement covering all six — customisable to your work →

See contracts

Where TrustSolo helps

You don't have to assemble these from scratch. TrustSolo's contract templates are customisable starting points, organised by discipline and structured around common UK freelance practice — they cover scope, payment, IP, revisions, termination and confidentiality as a coherent whole, and let you adjust the commercial terms to each engagement. They're starting points rather than legal advice, and for anything high-value or unusual it's worth a professional opinion. You can see how they work under contracts.

The six clauses, at a glance

Scope of work — what's included, and that anything else is quoted separately.
Payment terms — fee, deposit, and a concrete due date; a line on late payment.
IP and ownership — who owns the work, and when (commonly, on full payment).
Revisions and changes — rounds included, and that a new direction is new work.
Termination and cancellation — notice or a kill fee, and completed work paid for.
Confidentiality — keeping what you're shown to yourself.

Short, plain, and clear on these six beats twenty pages of boilerplate every time.

Put a clean agreement covering these in front of each new client, before the work starts, and most of what goes wrong in freelancing simply never gets the chance to — one of several habits our complete guide to going freelance walks through. When you'd like that made easy, you can start free — no card required.