10 Clauses Every Freelance Contract Needs

1. Who the parties are

Full legal names, not brand names. If you trade through a company, the company is the party, not you personally. If your client is one division of a large group, name the entity that will actually pay the invoice, because that is who you would need to pursue.

2. Scope of work

The deliverables, in specific terms, and an explicit list of what is not included. “A website” is not a scope. “Five responsive page templates, two rounds of revisions, excluding copywriting and photography” is. This is the single clause that prevents the most disputes, and it is the one most often left vague to avoid an awkward conversation at signing.

3. Fees and payment terms

The total, the schedule, the deposit, the currency, the accepted methods, and the deadline expressed in days. The contract is the place these live; the invoice only repeats them. Get the wording right using payment terms that get you paid on time, and note here whether your fee excludes tax.

4. Change requests

What happens when the client asks for something outside the scope: how it gets requested, how you price it, and that work does not start until it is approved in writing. Without this clause, every extra is a negotiation from a standing start, and you will concede most of them because arguing costs more than the work.

5. Revisions

A number, and what counts as one. “Two rounds of consolidated feedback” protects you from eleven separate emails being treated as one round. State the hourly or per-round rate for revisions beyond the included number so the answer to “can we just” is a price rather than a refusal.

6. Intellectual property and when it transfers

Who owns the finished work, and from when. The clause worth insisting on is that ownership transfers on full payment, not on delivery. Say what happens to working files, source files and anything you licensed from a third party, and reserve the right to show the work in your portfolio unless there is a reason not to.

7. Timeline and client dependencies

Your deadlines are real only if the client’s are. Write down what you need from them, by when, and state that your dates shift if theirs slip. Almost every late project is late because content, feedback or access arrived weeks after it was promised, and without this clause the delay becomes your fault by default. Tracking those dependencies against the project rather than in an email thread makes the conversation short and factual when it happens.

8. Termination

How either side ends the agreement, with how much notice, and what is owed at that point. The important half is the money: you should be paid for work completed and in progress up to the termination date, and any deposit should be explicitly non-refundable. A contract with no exit is worse than no contract, because it makes leaving feel like a breach.

9. Liability

A cap on your total liability, commonly the value of the contract, and an exclusion of indirect or consequential losses. This is the clause that stops a €4,000 project turning into a claim for a client’s lost revenue. It is also the clause most often quietly deleted from a client-supplied contract, which is worth checking for.

10. Confidentiality and governing law

A mutual confidentiality clause covering what each side learns about the other, and a statement of which country’s law applies and where disputes are heard. For international work, governing law is not a formality: enforcing an agreement under a legal system on the other side of the world is usually not worth attempting.

When the client sends their contract instead

Sooner or later you will be handed a twelve-page agreement written for the client’s benefit, and reading it properly takes an hour you will not want to spend. Skim for the four that matter most: unlimited revisions, IP transferring on delivery rather than payment, an uncapped indemnity, and payment terms longer than 30 days. Any of them is worth an email before you sign.

If you would rather not do that by eye, an AI contract scanner reads the document and returns the risks and unusual clauses in a couple of minutes, which at least tells you where to spend your attention. The specific patterns worth looking for are set out in contract red flags an AI catches, and once the contract is signed the practical side of the relationship is covered in the client onboarding checklist.