How to Ask a Client for a Deposit

You are standing in a kitchen you finished measuring twenty minutes ago. The client likes the number. Then there is a pause where you have to say the part about the deposit, and the pause is where it goes wrong. You hear yourself soften it, and the sentence that comes out is an apology for an ordinary business term.

A deposit lands when it is attached to something specific and it stalls when it is attached to your reputation. "I take a third up front" is a policy, and a policy invites a negotiation about the policy. "The cabinets get ordered against your job and my supplier wants half at the order" is a reason. The difference matters most after you leave, when the client repeats it to a spouse who was not standing in the kitchen.

Name what the money buys before you name the number. Material ordered to size for this job. The supplier's own deposit. The week that comes off the calendar and cannot be sold twice. Say those out loud in the walkthrough and the number arrives as arithmetic instead of as a demand.

An apology inside the ask does more damage than a high number does. A client hearing "I hate to ask, but" learns that the term is soft, and a term that is soft on the day it is agreed to is soft in week six when he wants to hold something back. The number I would defend is not the biggest one. It is the one I can explain in a sentence without dropping my voice.

The client who worries you is not the one who pushes back. It is the one who agrees instantly and signs without reading, which is worse, because a client who argues about the deposit is showing you exactly how he will handle the second payment, and a client who signs without a question has shown you nothing at all.

Whatever you said in the kitchen has to survive into the document, because the kitchen is not where the disagreement happens. Write down the deposit amount, what it is being applied to, and what has to be finished before the next payment is due. A deposit line that says only a dollar figure records the amount and nothing about the agreement behind it.

There is a version of a service agreement where the ask is not a separate conversation you have to win. The scope of the work and the money for the work are the same object. The customer funds the contract before work begins. The money is held until each milestone is complete, and that portion releases to the provider. What changes for the provider is that the deposit stops being a favor he requested and becomes the first line of the thing both people already agreed to.

Rules about deposits and advance payments vary by state, and some states regulate them directly. This article is about what people commonly do, not about what any law requires. For what a specific state's rules actually say, see the deposit guides in the knowledge base. For how the same question looks from the other side of the kitchen, see is 50 percent up front normal.

You are going to ask for a deposit on every job you take for the rest of your working life. The version of the ask that works is not louder or more confident than the one you are using now. It is the one where you already know what the money is for before the client asks.