Number of Revisions: Defining a Round, Billing the Rest

A client returns a marked-up PDF on Tuesday with thirty-one comments in it. On Thursday somebody else on the same team emails four more, and one of those four reverses comment nineteen. Is that one round of revisions or two?

The contract does not say. It says two (2) rounds of revisions included, which is the sentence everybody negotiates and the sentence that decides the least. Rounds are the stretch of a project that sits between "delivered" and "accepted," and acceptance is usually what the invoice hangs off. A clause that counts rounds without defining one leaves that whole stretch unmeasured, and the side that benefits from an unmeasured stretch is never the side doing the work.

A round is a window, not a pile of comments

Four things have to be true before a number means anything. A round is comments on one named deliverable, arriving consolidated in a single document, sent by one named person, inside a stated number of business days. Strip out any one of the four and the count collapses. Drop the deliverable and the client counts the project while you count the page. Drop consolidation and Thursday's four comments are free. Drop the named person and every stakeholder gets their own rounds. Drop the window and there is no such thing as late feedback, so the last round never closes.

Marketplace paperwork is built around the window rather than the pile, which is worth noticing if you have ever tried to explain the distinction to a client who has never had to think about it. On Upwork's fixed-price contracts the client has 14 days to review submitted work and either accept it or request changes, and if they take no action at all the funds release automatically. Request changes and the payment holds — then, in Upwork's own words, when the freelancer submits the revised work a new 14-day review window starts (Upwork, Review and pay for fixed-price contracts and milestones, read 20 September 2026). Nothing in that design counts rounds. It counts windows, each one opened by a submission and closed by a decision or by silence.

Silence closing a window in your favour is the part worth stealing. It is the only mechanism that puts a ceiling on a revision stage without requiring the client to agree to a ceiling.

Three buckets, and only one of them is billable

Before you can bill an extra round you have to be able to say why this particular set of comments is work rather than repair. The most precise version of that distinction I could find in a government document is not in any freelance statute. It is in a printing procurement clause that predates all of them.

GPO Publication 310.2, the Contract Terms that attach to federal print jobs, defines author's alterations as "all marks made by the author at variance with the original Government furnished material as submitted to the contractor, but do not include corrections made by the author due to the failure of the contractor to follow the furnished material literally" (Supplemental Specifications, paragraph 16(a)). One paragraph earlier, the same document handles the other side: where a contractor's errors are serious enough in the GPO's own opinion to require revised proofs, "the revised proofs are to be provided at no expense to the Government. No extra time can be allowed for this reproofing" (Supplemental Specifications, paragraph 15(d)). I pulled the current PDF from gpo.gov on 20 September 2026 and both paragraphs sit on printed page 17.

That gives you three buckets instead of two.

Your error. You misspelled the product name, exported at the wrong aspect ratio, used last quarter's logo when the current one was in the shared folder. Free — and, the part freelancers give away without noticing, no schedule relief either. The federal clause is explicit that the delivery date does not move to accommodate your own reproofing.

Their change. The brief said blue, the file is blue, and now they would like green. Billable once the included rounds are spent, regardless of how small the change is or how apologetically it arrives.

The gap. The brief never said anything about the colour. This is the bucket that eats freelance projects, and a revision clause does not settle it. The assumptions and exclusions list in the scope of work does, because that list is what turns "unstated" into "out of scope" rather than "implied." It is carrying more weight than the round count is, and it is broken down in the scope of work walkthrough.

Rounds, directions, and the number people actually mean

Two numbers get collapsed into the single phrase rounds of revisions, and they are not the same number. AIGA's model agreement keeps them apart: a proposal should spell out, phase by phase, "the number of creative directions that you will be showing, the number of revisions or refinements that are included, the format for delivery, the necessary timeframe" (AIGA, Standard Form of Agreement for Design Services, 2022 update, read 20 September 2026).

Directions are alternatives. Revisions are refinements of the one that got chosen. Three concepts followed by two rounds on the selected concept is not five rounds — it is a directions number and a revisions number, and where the clause has only one blank in it, the client eventually fills that blank with whichever reading costs them less. Write both, and write them per stage: concepts at the concept stage, revisions at the execution stage, and a separate line for what happens when somebody asks to go back to a direction that was rejected two weeks ago.

Then attach the count to a unit. "Two rounds included" on a twelve-template website and "two rounds per template" are the same seven words describing an elevenfold difference in labour. The unit is whatever your deliverables list already names — a template, a cut, a chapter, a campaign — which is one more reason the deliverables have to be itemised before a revision clause can mean anything at all.

The four blanks most revision clauses leave empty

Here is the shape of a clause that survives the Tuesday-and-Thursday problem. The blanks are the point; the prose around them is deliberately ordinary.

Each deliverable listed in Schedule A includes [two] rounds of revision. A round consists of a single consolidated set of written comments on one deliverable, submitted by [named role] as the Client's sole authorised reviewer, received within [five] business days of delivery. Comments received after that period, comments that reverse a previously approved instruction, and comments from any person other than the authorised reviewer are treated as a new round. Rounds beyond those included are billed at [$X per hour / $X per round], invoiced on completion, and may extend the delivery schedule. Corrections required because a deliverable does not conform to Schedule A are not rounds and are performed at no charge.

Four blanks, and the last sentence is what makes the rest defensible. Without it you are charging for your own typos, and a client who spots that stops believing anything else in the paragraph. The "reverses a previously approved instruction" line is the other quiet earner: it covers the scenario the round count is worst at pricing, which is not a client asking for more but a client asking for the opposite of what they asked for in round one.

Billing the overage: hourly, per round, or a new deal

Three structures, and they fail in different places.

Time and materials at a stated hourly rate. AIGA's clause 4.1 is the standard version, and it is quoted in full in the scope creep walkthrough. The half of it that decides an overage is the tail, where the charges are put "in addition to all other amounts payable under the Proposal, despite any maximum budget, contract price or final price identified therein." That trailing phrase is the whole clause. If your agreement carries a not-to-exceed cap or a fixed project price anywhere in it — and most client MSAs do — an overage provision without that language can be read as billing against the cap rather than on top of it, which means the extra rounds are free until the cap is reached and then free after that too.

A flat price per round. Easier to sell, easier for a client to approve, and it ends the argument about timesheets before it starts. The risk is picking the number by feel. Price it off an hour estimate you would actually defend, then round. If you have no defensible hourly figure, survey data beats instinct: the Editorial Freelancers Association publishes a rate chart built from a survey of more than 1,100 members, run from November 2025 through mid-January 2026 and covering rates charged during the 2025 calendar year. It puts median hourly ranges at $50.00–60.00 for business and marketing copyediting and $57.50–70.00 for nonfiction developmental editing (EFA 2026 Rate Chart, read 20 September 2026). The EFA states plainly that it neither sets rates nor advises members on what to charge, and the chart covers editorial work rather than design or video. Treat it as a floor to argue from, not a price list.

A percentage threshold that triggers a new deal. AIGA 4.2 handles the case where the revisions have stopped being revisions: if the client requests changes amounting to a revision in or near excess of ___ percent of the time required to produce the deliverables, or of the value or scope of the services, the designer may submit a new and separate proposal, and "work shall not begin on the revised services until a fully signed revised Proposal" and any additional retainer are received. Fill that blank with something small enough to be reachable. A threshold nobody ever crosses is a clause that does not exist.

Whichever structure you pick, one sequencing rule sits under all three, and the federal print contract states it more bluntly than any freelance template does: charges for author's alterations "will not be honored unless the invoice/voucher which is submitted to the GPO is supported by a contract modification" (GPO Publication 310.2, Supplemental Specifications, paragraph 16(b) — the Contract Clauses half of the same document has its own paragraph 16, about something else entirely). Written authorisation first, hours second, invoice third. Reverse the first two and you are not billing an overage. You are asking a favour and attaching a number to it.

The rate belongs in the contract, not in the follow-up email

Three states now require the written contract itself to carry the number you will eventually bill at, and four cities do the same thing at their own thresholds. None of the three states uses the word "revision," and that is worth stating with its boundaries showing. On 20 September 2026 I searched the text of California's Part 5 in full (all eight sections, 18100 through 18107), the Illinois Act as enrolled in Public Act 103-417, and New York's Article 44-A in full (sections 1410 through 1415). The word does not appear in any of them. That is a statement about those sections and nothing outside them: it says nothing about case law, agency guidance, or any other statute that might touch the same invoice. What all three do require is the rate, and a revision overage is a rate.

Illinois's Freelance Worker Protection Act, in force for contracts entered into on or after 1 July 2024, requires the written contract to include "an itemization of all products and services to be provided by the freelance worker, the value of the products and services to be provided under the terms of the contract, and the rate and method of compensation" (820 ILCS 193/15(b)(2)). A note on that link, because it is not the state's own site. Illinois publishes its code at ilga.gov, and ilga.gov refused connections on 20 September 2026 — as it did on the two earlier dates recorded in the Illinois walkthrough. So the wording above was read off the enrolled text of Public Act 103-417, the General Assembly's own PDF of the bill as signed, and it matches the reproduction linked above word for word. The Illinois Department of Labor lists the same contract contents in plain English in its FWPA FAQ. New York's statewide Freelance Isn't Free Act, effective 28 August 2024, requires "an itemization of all services to be provided by the freelance worker, the value of the services to be provided pursuant to the contract, and the rate and method of compensation" (General Business Law section 1412). California's version, applying to contracts entered into or renewed on or after 1 January 2025, requires "an itemized list of all services to be provided by the freelance worker, including the value of those services and the rate and method of compensation" (Business and Professions Code section 18103(b)(2)).

The retention periods differ in a way worth knowing before anyone deletes anything. Illinois gives the contracting entity no less than two years (820 ILCS 193/15(c)), California the hiring party four (section 18103(a)), New York six (General Business Law section 1412(3)). That is the client's obligation rather than yours, but it tells you how long the document you would be arguing about is supposed to exist on their side. Do not read any of those numbers as the deadline for bringing a claim — that is a different clock in a different section, and in Illinois the two-year figure appears in both places for unrelated reasons.

None of this makes an unstated rate unenforceable, and it would be wrong to read it that way. California says close to the opposite in as many words: section 18103(c) preserves oral contracts and promissory estoppel, and lists what can serve as evidence that a contract was formed — that the hiring party made representations about the rate, and that the freelance worker provided "in writing any document to the hiring party, including email, text message, or other electronic communication, a summary of the rate and work to be performed prior to performing the work." Read that as a procedure rather than a consolation. Before an extra round starts, send the rate and the scope of that round in writing. It takes two sentences, and in at least one state the legislature has already said in the statute that it counts for something.

"One more round and then we'll pay"

This is the sentence the whole topic exists to deal with, and the three states do not treat it identically.

California is the only one of the three that names extra work in the statute. Once a freelance worker has commenced performance, a hiring party "shall not require as a condition of timely payment that the freelance worker" either accept less compensation than the contract specifies or "provide more goods or services or grant more intellectual property rights than agreed to in the contract" (Business and Professions Code section 18102(b)). That is the subdivision an unbilled extra round would be read against — whether a particular hold-up is one is a question about the facts of a particular job, and not one this page can answer. The remedy attached to it is not small: where a hiring party violates a provision other than the payment and written-contract sections, section 18106(b)(3) says the freelance worker "may be awarded damages equal to the value of the contract or the work performed, whichever is greater," and subdivision (b) opens by giving a prevailing plaintiff reasonable attorney's fees and costs. "May" is the statute's word, not a softening of it — the award sits with the court.

Illinois and New York wrote the equivalent provision more narrowly. Illinois says the contracting entity "shall not require as a condition of timely payment that the freelance worker accept less compensation than the amount of the contracted compensation" (820 ILCS 193/10(b)), and New York's section 1411(2) uses the same formulation. Extra unpaid work is not named in either. Depending on the facts, being made to work more for the same fee may amount to accepting less compensation for what was actually delivered — but that is an argument rather than a citation, and it is one for a lawyer admitted in that state to make rather than you. The map of which law covers which invoice is in freelance contract law by state.

All three share the same fallback on timing: where the contract fixes no payment date, compensation falls due no later than 30 days after completion of the services. Which raises the obvious question of what "completion" means while a fifth round is pending. That one belongs to the payment clause rather than the revision clause, and it is worked through in what the payment clock counts from.

Where the round count meets the acceptance test

A revision clause is only as good as the acceptance language next to it, and this is where otherwise careful contracts leak.

Define acceptance as the client being satisfied and the number of rounds is decorative. Two are included, a third is billable, and none of it produces a moment at which the work is finished, because satisfaction has no test and no deadline. Define acceptance as conformity with the specification in the schedule, plus a review window that resolves by default, and rounds turn into a service level — something you sell more of — instead of the gate the money is sitting behind.

AIGA's clause 4.4 is one published version of that window: the client has five business days from receipt of each deliverable to notify the designer in writing of any failure to comply with the specifications set out in the proposal, or of any other objections or corrections. Written, specific enough to identify the concern, time-boxed. Pair it with a deemed-acceptance line and the arithmetic changes. The fifth round is still something you would happily sell. It is no longer the thing standing between you and an invoice date.

Two other clauses are wired into this one. If the job dies in the middle of round four, what you are owed comes out of the termination provision rather than the revision provision — AIGA's clause 11.3 pays for services performed through the termination date plus outstanding costs of changes, which is the mechanics behind sizing a kill fee. And where revision stages run long, the cleanest fix is structural rather than textual: bill at milestones, so a disputed final round only ever holds up the last tranche instead of the whole fee. That choice is laid out in deposits, milestones and holdbacks.

Pick the number last. Decide what closes a window, who is allowed to open one, which bucket a comment falls into, and what the extra ones cost. Once those four are on paper, two or three or five is a detail you can concede in a negotiation without conceding anything that matters.

Statutory text read on 20 September 2026: New York from the Senate's own copy of the General Business Law, California from leginfo, Illinois from the enrolled text of Public Act 103-417 because ilga.gov would not answer. The AIGA, GPO, IDOL, EFA and Upwork documents were read the same day. Freelance payment statutes in these three states are new enough that neighbouring states keep filing bills modelled on them, so this page is due a re-read on 20 March 2027. None of it is legal advice, and whether any of these provisions reaches your particular contract is a question for a lawyer admitted in the jurisdiction whose law that contract names.