Terms You Need In Your Residential Interior Design Service Agreement
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Written July 2021 | Updated January 2025
When I start working with interior design business owners to streamline their operations, most of them have a contract they’ve been using for years. But as we review their client experience to figure out where things are broken, we almost always find ways to make that contract work harder. Not only to protect their business but also to make life easier for them and their clients.
While I’m not an attorney, I recommend reviewing your contract after every project to see if you need to tighten it up or make changes. (Because let’s be honest — every project presents its own set of challenges.)
A solid residential interior design contract is one of the very first ways to create a smoother, more professional, and more profitable business. If your contract terms don’t line up with your actual design process, or you’re unsure how to lean on your contract when something goes sideways, you’re setting yourself up for headaches later.
A solid residential interior design contract is one of the many steps to creating a seamless experience for you and your customers. If your contract terms aren’t aligned with your interior design process OR you’re unsure how to rely on your contract when issues pop up, you’ll eventually run into some bumps in the road.
My Favorite Interior Design Contract Terms
After working with 100+ interior designers and (jumping on calls with their attorneys to make sure their contracts were buttoned up), I’m sharing a few of my favorite terms that I often see missing from residential interior design contracts.
Interestingly enough, these are also the challenges my interior design business owner clients face that make running their business difficult.
Let’s dive in!
01 | COMMUNICATION
This is one of the most important items you should specify in your residential interior design contract (this goes for ANY service provider, regardless of the industry)! Things get personal when you’re working closely with someone for an extended period of time, and boundaries can start to get fuzzy after a while.
Including a term about your communication policies allows you to proactively outline how and when clients should communicate with you to receive the most timely response.
Want to stop getting text messages from clients around the clock? Put it in your contract.
Don’t want to meet or have calls on evenings or weekends? Put it in your contract.
02 | THE CONTRACT TERM
If your clients think they have you forever, they won’t be in a rush to make decisions and that’s when your profitability takes a hit.
Spell out the length of your engagement and key milestones, even if you work hourly.
As the pro, you should know how long each phase of your interior design process will take, and to be of service to your clients, you should let them know how long their service will take (or at least provide estimates for key milestones).
📣 Tip: If every project and timeline is different, be sure to check out our Waitlist Workshop to learn the standard project timelines for various service offerings.
By including this term in your contract, if (and more often when) a project has delays because of something outside of your control, you have a way to ensure you are compensated for the additional time spent on the project.
03 | PAYMENT DUE DATES
Creating fixed dates for payments is key to making sure you get paid, meaning, make the payment due XX days after contract signing rather than tying it to a client related event. If the event date pushes (because it’s in your client’s hands) so does your payment! To prevent this from happening, tie payment due dates to dates, not deliverables.
04 | LATE FEES
Obviously, your contract likely includes a standard late fees clause, but are you sharing it anywhere else? Like in your invoice memo lines, your pre-presentation and post-presentation emails, etc.?
Do you have protections in place if the client’s invoices are seriously past due?
This.is.important!
05 | BUDGET
You don’t want to start designing without knowing your client’s project budget (and possibly design a whole space they can’t afford). <— please never ever do that!
If your client doesn’t know what their budget is, that’s the benefit of working with a pro like you. You will help them prepare a realistic budget for their project as one of your first steps together.
If this is a struggle for you, I highly recommend you add your name to the waitlist for our signature program, The Designed to Scale® Method, where we will help designers understand their numbers so they can easily share project pricing and budget info with clients.
06 | REQUOTING FEES
It isn’t free for you or your team to reach out to vendors to get updated pricing when a quote expires because a client deprioritized approving their design. Make sure to have a policy on this that protects your time AND your project timeline.
07 | TRADE PRICING
If you haven’t been asked by a potential client what YOUR price is on something you are selling to a client, are you even an interior designer? (I kid, I kid!)
This will happen.
I recommend having something in your contract that protects you from disclosing your trade pricing and information. I’m not saying not to disclose to clients that furnishings are billed through you (as well as x, y, z) I’m saying you want something that protects you from having to share your information. Yes, this is probably overkill, but it’s something I’ve seen as a gap often enough that I worked with my attorney to include this in our contract template for full service interior designers.
08 | REINSTATEMENT FEE
If you have clients fall off midway through the design process and then don’t hear from them for weeks, how can you maintain your pipeline and your obligations to other contracted projects when you allocate certain hours and resources to their project completion in the timeline you outlined in the contract and in their welcome guide?
You can’t.
Having a term in your contract about this lets clients know what happens if they go MIA, and protects you so you can pause their project and focus on your active clients.
09 | REVISIONS
Many interior designers lose money in revisions, and I’m not surprised: I’ve seen many design businesses that don’t have a revisions policy clearly stated anywhere.
Your residential interior design contract should set parameters around revisions to keep things moving forward and on track. There are several ways you can do this, but however you structure it, be sure the parameters work for your business and are accounted for in your design fee.
REMINDER: I am not an attorney and this is not legal advice.
Using Your Interior Design Contract To Back You Up
Once you get your interior design contract terms and conditions in place (check out my Interior Designer Scope and Service Agreement here), there are some really great ways you can fall back on them (when needed) during the interior design process.
First and foremost, you might have a client read your contract and say “this is so long!” To that you should respond, “Yes, I’ve been doing this for X number of years, and if you see any terms in there that feel a little wild, know they are there because of a situation we experienced! We’ve learned it’s best to be transparent and cover our bases, to protect us and our clients. We’ll be working together for a long time, and like to lay everything out up front.”
You can also use your residential interior design contract to enforce your communication boundaries. When your clients contact you outside of the outlined communication agreement, you can always refer back to the contract and send a friendly reminder of the policy you have in place. If they keep communicating outside of your set hours/methods, you can copy and paste the communication term from your contract as a more firm reminder of how you can best serve them and what they agreed to.
I also recommend reading the key terms of the contract with your client at their initial new client meeting so they know and understand what they signed off on. Doing this helps to formalize the process, build trust, and provide them with an opportunity to ask for clarification on any parts of your process if needed.
Need a Residential Interior Design Service Agreement?
While these are just a few of the terms interior designers can include in their contracts to protect themselves and their bottom line, there are many more. If reading this post makes you realize some of the issues in your process are happening because of gaps in your contract, I’d love for you to check out my full-service residential interior design contract template or my design day contract template.
I created these with an attorney to specifically address the terms I discussed above, along with a ton of other invaluable clauses to protect designers from challenges I’ve seen with my 1:1 clients.
🎁 BONUS: Our contract template includes TWO plug-and-play sample scopes of work to simplify the entire process for you (this has allowed my clients to reduce their project scope writing time from weeks to less than an hour!!) <— YES!!!
Plus, our full-service contract also includes an addendum template so you can easily add in new scope without having to write a new ten-page contract.
Simply plug in your business-specific language, remove the clauses that don’t apply to your services and pricing structure, and then send it to your licensed attorney for review. Click here to put it in the cart.
