Urgency is a service, and it is not free

Urgency is usually worth a quarter to a half again on the base price, charged as a percentage rather than a flat sum. A rush job is the same job plus the loss of your ability to decide when to do it, and that loss is what the fee is for.

Price it as a service you offer, not a favour you occasionally grant.

What the buyer is actually buying

Not speed. Certainty about a date.

A standard job promises a quality of assessment; a rush job promises the same quality by a stated hour, and the second promise is the one that can fail visibly.

That also means a rush tier is only worth offering if you can keep it. A missed rush deadline is worse than a missed standard one, because the buyer paid specifically for the thing that did not happen, and the review will say so.

Why a percentage, not a flat addition

A flat rush charge underprices your expensive work and overprices your cheap work at the same time.

A single flat surcharge is a large proportion of a short written assessment, where the disruption is minor, and a trivial proportion of a recorded piece, where the disruption is real. You end up with a rush tier that attracts exactly the jobs you least want to rush.

A percentage tracks the disruption, because the disruption scales roughly with how much of your day the job occupies. Below a quarter it changes nobody's behaviour, including yours; above a half it reads as a deterrent rather than a tier, which is a legitimate thing to want but should be a decision rather than an accident.

Keep it as a stated line on the card rather than a number you produce on request. A published surcharge is a policy; a quoted one is an opening offer, and the case for publishing prices rather than quoting applies with more force here than anywhere else. A printed figure also becomes the anchor in the sense Tversky and Kahneman (1974, Science) described, where estimates adjust from whatever relevant value is available.

The trap

The rush fee is almost never lost to a buyer who refused it. It is lost to a buyer who asked nicely.

Someone explains that they need it tonight, apologises for the short notice, and the fee quietly does not get mentioned. You do the work at the standard price, at eleven at night, and file it in your head as a goodwill gesture.

It is not a goodwill gesture. It is a discount granted for tone, and it teaches that buyer that urgency is free; the second time, they will not think to offer.

The correction is a sentence prepared in advance, so that you are not composing one under pressure: same-day is possible, it is the rush tier, and here is the total. Buyers accept this at a rate that surprises earners, because a person who charges for extra work reads as a professional rather than as difficult.

What a rush tier does to the rest of the card

Two useful side effects, one risk.

A rush option makes your standard turnaround read as a considered choice rather than a limitation, and it gives you something to offer a buyer who wants a concession when you are unwilling to move on price.

The risk is drift. If most bookings arrive as rushes, your standard turnaround is longer than the market expects and the tier is quietly repricing your whole card. Fix the base turnaround rather than enjoying the surcharge.

Buyers commissioning a person usually want a considered answer rather than an instant one, and the buyer-side account of how these commissions are arranged is worth reading for how rarely genuine urgency features in it. Where someone does want something immediately, an automated assessment already returns in seconds, and what that result covers is what your rush tier is implicitly priced against - as are the self-serve tools most buyers try first.

Rate Cock's turnaround expectations for commissioned judges sit on its judges page, which is the right reference for what fast means on a given platform rather than in general.