The 30% Rule: How Much to Set Aside From Every Brand Deal

Step One: Price the Deal, Don't Just Quote Your Hours

Before you can set anything aside, you need a rate that actually reflects what the partnership is worth. This is where a lot of creators underprice or even overprice themselves: they count the hours it took to film and edit, add a little padding, and call it a rate. Brands aren't pricing your time. They're pricing a bet.

When a brand evaluates what to pay you, they're typically weighing three things:

• • Follower count and audience size. A rough proxy for reach, and usually the first filter a brand applies.
• • Content quality. Production value, editing, and how well your style matches their brand.
• • Engagement rate. Often the biggest lever. A smaller, highly engaged audience can out-earn a larger, passive one, because engagement is what predicts whether the content actually drives action.

Put together, those three inputs are the brand's estimate of performance, not a receipt for your labor. A video that takes you three hours to shoot and edit might drive thousands of dollars in sales for the brand, or it might not move the needle at all. Either way, they're paying for the expected outcome, and your rate should be anchored to that value, not to an hourly wage.

A practical way to land on a number: start with a base rate benchmarked against creators in your niche and follower range, then adjust up for above-average engagement, usage rights (can the brand reuse your content in ads?), exclusivity periods, and platform — a video that lives on multiple platforms is worth more than one that lives on one. Adjust down only if the brand is covering costs you'd otherwise carry, like product, travel, or a paid ad boost you don't have to manage.

Once you and the brand land on a number that works for both sides, that's your rate. Now it's time to protect it.

This is the same "pay yourself, then pay the IRS" instinct that personal finance educators like Vivian Tu (Your Rich BFF) have popularized for freelance and gig income: treat the tax portion as already spent, so you're never scrambling to find it later. Because tax rules and rates shift from year to year, it's worth checking your actual bracket and self-employment tax obligations each season rather than assuming last year's math still holds.

The mechanics matter more than the percentage. A few habits that make the 30% Rule stick:

• • Open a separate account for taxes and admin money only, and don't touch it for anything else.
• • Move the money the same day the payment clears, before it blends into your regular spending.
• • Automate the transfer if your bank allows a percentage-based rule, so it doesn't depend on remembering.
• • Pay quarterly estimated taxes if you expect to owe more than a small amount for the year, so you're not hit with an underpayment penalty in April.

What to Do With the 70% You Keep

Setting aside the 30% is only half the job. The 70% that's left is where you actually run your business and build financial security, so it's worth being intentional with it too. Once your near-term expenses are covered, surplus brand deal income is best used to reinvest in your content business — better gear, a content editor, paid ad tests — or to build savings, rather than treating every deal as pure spending money.

And when you're deciding which brand deals to take in the first place, price and payout aside, the partnerships that perform best long-term tend to be the ones you'd genuinely use or recommend. Authenticity shows up in engagement rate, which is exactly what got you the rate in the first place. TallyFox can help you keep track of your creator business expenses so you can do a quick overview of what's deductible.