Available Without Being Paid for It
Time held open for one client cannot be sold to anybody else, and the expectation of readiness is usually unpriced because nobody names it.
Is any time off paid, or do I just not earn?
The law where you areDo I have to ask, or only tell them?
What you signedWhat happens in a month with no work in it?
Only what happensDoes turning something down count against me?
Four questions a person in this position actually asks. One of them has no answer anybody can give in advance, and nothing here fills a blank with a guess. Two of these have findable answers and two depend entirely on the people involved.
Time held open for one client cannot be sold to anybody else. The expectation that you will be reachable, or able to start quickly, has a real cost and is usually unpriced, because nobody ever says it out loud.
The recordkeeping question in “Available Without Being Paid for It” becomes clearer when hours, projects and approvals can be checked before an invoice or payment is final. A team reviewing a practical approach to step rate compensation for step rate compensation can use that shared context to resolve discrepancies, while contractual status, deductions and statutory treatment remain separate decisions for the responsible specialist.
Naming it is most of the fix, and it is a conversation almost nobody has.
The Handshake early-career articles offers a useful outside reference for “Available Without Being Paid for It”. It should help form better questions rather than replace advice based on the person’s actual working arrangement.
How the expectation forms
Nothing is agreed. You answer quickly a few times, you take a short-notice piece once, and within a few months the client plans on the assumption that you are available.
From their side nothing is happening. From yours, several weeks a year are being held open for work that may not arrive.
What it actually costs you
Specifically: the work you cannot take because this client might call, the week you do not book because something may come up, and the concentration spent on being reachable.
That is not a complaint about an unreasonable client. It is an unpriced item in an arrangement where everything else has a price.
The shapes it takes
Worth separating, because they cost very different amounts:
| Shape | What it holds open |
|---|---|
| Replying to messages the same day | Very little |
| Reachable within an hour in working time | Your concentration |
| Able to start within a few days | Capacity you cannot sell |
| Reserved days each month | Specific days |
| Available outside working hours | Your evenings |
Only the first of those is politeness. The rest are things you are selling, and the money disappears at the point where you stop noticing the difference.
Making it a term
The straightforward version, agreed at the start or at a renewal:
I reply to messages within one working day. For anything needing a faster response, or for work at under a week's notice, there is a premium of X.
Stated once, it converts an assumption into a term. Clients generally accept it, and the ones who object have told you what they were relying on.
The retainer
Where real readiness is needed, there is a commercial form for it: you are paid for a block of days each month regardless of whether they call on you, and in return you keep those days free on the notice you both agreed.
It makes the thing explicit on both sides. If a retainer is never drawn down, that is worth asking about — but you have been paid for the readiness, which is the point.
Response times you can keep
Set them at what you can actually do on a bad week, not on a good one. An undertaking to reply within an hour, broken regularly, is worse than a one-day commitment honoured.
This is the rare case where promising less makes you more reliable and more pleasant to work with.
The phone that is always on
A habit rather than a term, and the one that quietly erodes everything. People in this position check messages in the evening because the work is their own, and the client learns from the pattern rather than from any agreement.
Nobody is at fault. It is also entirely within your control, which makes it one of the few things here you can change this week.
Being asked to be on call
A specific request and a legitimate commercial arrangement: a payment for readiness and a rate for actual work.
What does not work is on-call as a goodwill expectation. That is the version most people are in, and it costs real money that nobody is paying.
Charging for short notice
Not opportunism. A premium for displacing other work is ordinary in most trades, and it has a useful second effect: it makes the client decide whether the urgency is real.
Businesses that have never paid a short-notice premium generate a great deal of urgency. The same businesses generate much less once it has a price.
The moment that makes it easy
At a renewal, at the start of a new piece of work, or when a short-notice request arrives — at which point the answer can simply include the figure.
Raising it in the abstract, mid-engagement, is harder than attaching it to a specific request, which is why the request is the moment.
What to look at in your own year
Two numbers: how many short-notice requests you took, and how many weeks you kept clear for work that never came.
Most people have never counted the second and find it larger than expected. It is the figure that makes the case for pricing readiness, first of all to yourself.
The thing with nothing under it
Whether naming the price costs you the relationship. No rule addresses it, no client announces it, and the effect would be invisible.
What is knowable is that an unpriced expectation gets larger rather than smaller on its own, and that the conversation does not become easier in year three than it would have been in year one.