A typical UK talent map — one role family, one region, with a compensation benchmark — models out at around £5,500, priced as a fixed project fee. Broad, junior, availability-only briefs sit near £2,750; rare, executive, full-intelligence briefs reach £15,000. Those are the anchors; everything on this page exists to show where they come from, so you can defend them in a proposal or swap in your own numbers.
One honesty note before the table: these figures are modelled, not surveyed. There is no reliable public survey of what UK agencies charge for standalone mapping work — most of it is still given away inside contingent pitches, which is exactly the problem selling mapping as a service fixes. So instead of laundering someone's marketing number into a "benchmark", this page publishes a transparent effort model and the fees it produces. Every figure below is reproducible from the assumptions stated.
£5,500
modelled fee for a typical single-function UK talent map: one specialist role family, one region, availability plus a compensation benchmark. Ten days of effort at £550/day — eight researching, two reporting — priced as a fixed fee, not a day rate.
TalentMaps fee model — illustrative, methodology published below
The benchmark: six briefs, priced
All six scenarios assume one role family, a £550 day rate and two days of reporting; only the difficulty of the brief changes. The band on each fee is ±10%, because scoping is judgement, not arithmetic.
| Brief | Rarity | Geography | Seniority | Depth | Days | Modelled fee |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Volume hiring pool check | Common | National | Junior | Availability | 5 | £2,750 |
| London AEs for a sales build | Common | Single city | Mid | Availability | 6 | £3,300 |
| Typical specialist function map | Specialist | Regional | Mid | + Compensation | 10 | £5,500 |
| Leadership bench, national | Specialist | National | Senior | Full intelligence | 13 | £7,150 |
| Cell-and-gene scientists, one cluster | Rare | Tight radius | Senior | + Compensation | 19 | £10,450 |
| Executive succession field, discreet | Rare | Tight radius | Exec | Full intelligence | 27 | £14,850 |
Read the spread, not just the rows. The cheapest and dearest briefs differ by more than five times, and none of that range comes from headcount — it comes from scarcity, tightness, seniority and depth. A client who understands that is a client who stops comparing your map fee to a job-board subscription.
The model, published
The fee is effort times rate, with effort driven by how hard the market is to read — not by how many names end up in the deliverable. A candidate count is an outcome of scarcity, so charging per profile gets the economics backwards.
Fee = (research days + reporting days) × day rate, where research days = 5 × difficulty per role family, and difficulty multiplies four factors:
| Factor | Options and multipliers |
|---|---|
| Rarity of the profile | Common ×0.7 · Specialist ×1.0 · Rare ×1.5 |
| Geography | National/global ×1.0 · Regional/city ×1.1 · Tight radius ×1.3 |
| Seniority | Junior ×0.8 · Mid ×1.0 · Senior ×1.3 · Exec ×1.6 |
| Depth of intelligence | Availability ×1.0 · + Compensation ×1.3 · + Full profiles ×1.6 |
The assumptions doing the quiet work: five research days to map one role family's market at the mid baseline, two reporting days to turn rows into a deliverable worth presenting (see what goes in a market map), and a £550 day rate, which is a defensible UK figure for senior research work — swap in your own. To run a brief through the model with your numbers, use the fee calculator; it is this model with sliders on.
Two things the model deliberately ignores. It doesn't discount for tooling — if enrichment software collapses your research days, that's your margin, not the client's discount. And it doesn't price the value of the decision the map informs, which is why these fees are anchors rather than ceilings: a map that de-risks a market entry is worth more than its day-count to the client funding it.
Where the fee sits next to the search
A map fee is small next to the retained search it typically sets up, and that ratio — a few thousand pounds of paid intelligence positioning a five-figure placement — is the real commercial argument for leading with the map. The mechanics of that conversion, including crediting part of the map fee against the search, are in from talent map to retained search.
And the fee holds up in a soft market, because mapping budgets sit apart from headcount budgets — the UK recruitment market snapshot tracks the conditions that make paid intelligence an easier sell than contingent placements right now.
Quote these anchors, adjust them to your day rate, and put them in a fixed-fee proposal. The number a client pushes back on is never the one you can show your working for.
Frequently asked questions
- How much does a talent map cost in the UK?
- A typical single-function map — one role family, one region, with a compensation benchmark — models out at around £5,500 as a fixed project fee. The realistic band runs from roughly £2,750 for a broad, junior, availability-only brief to £15,000 for a rare, executive, full-intelligence one. These are modelled anchors from a published effort model, not a survey of agency rate cards: your own fee should reflect your day rate and the decision the map informs.
- Is talent mapping charged as a percentage of salary?
- No — and it shouldn't be. A percentage fee prices a placement; a map is intelligence, and its value has nothing to do with one person's pay packet. The standard structure is a fixed project fee scaled to scope and depth, sometimes with part of the fee credited against a retained search if the client proceeds within an agreed window.
- What makes a talent map more expensive?
- Four things, multiplied together: how rare the target profile is, how tight the geography is, how senior the population is, and how deep the intelligence goes — availability only, plus compensation, or full named profiles. A rare, senior brief in a tight location with full intelligence takes roughly four times the research effort of a common, mid-level, availability-only one, and the fee follows the effort.
- Why publish the pricing model?
- Because 'it depends' is useless to an agency trying to put a number in a proposal, and invented survey figures would be worse. A transparent model — days times day rate, scaled by four difficulty factors — gives you an anchor you can defend in front of a client, and swap your own day rate into. If you quote these figures, cite this page: the anchors only mean something with the assumptions attached.
Written by
Joshua Aubrey · Founder, TalentMaps