What do you want your facilitator to do? Pay your facilitator for what you want them to do rather than for who they are. If you want somebody to do easy straight delivery training work with junior staff pay them for that. If you somebody to work in an experiential way with senior people on a really difficult workshop that will take the facilitator days to recover from, expect to pay more.

How do you calculate an appropriate daily rate for a facilitator that relates appropriately to your environment for your particular kind of work?

There are two factors that guide what one might expect to pay for a Professional Facilitator.

The first of these is the number of direct delivery or effective days per month.

Salary can therefore be approximately divided by 144 (12 days for 12 months) to arrive at an equivalent daily rate if a manager were working as a Professional Facilitator. The difference is there are no associated overheads and you only pay an independent practitioner when you need them.

The second factor is what you are paying the most senior people with whom you wish the facilitator to work or on whose behalf you wish them to act. A guide therefore to use the salary of the most senior person with whom the facilitator will need to interact as a basis for the fee calculation.

Remember to add an amount for the overhead costs of National Insurance, pension contributions, office space, utilities, holiday pay telephone, stationery, clerical support, IT, etc to which both you and the facilitator are subject. In our examples we have tried to err on the side of understatement of these costs by using 50%. In reality these overheads are often more than 100%.

The table of costs gives some idea of what would be reasonable management costs using these factors for different types of work.

To these costs you will need to add mileage at 35p per mile and VAT (assuming all other costs at cost or direct to client account).