Your Costs Just Went Up. Here Is How to Raise Your Prices.

Inflation hit 3.3% yesterday. Fuel costs are up 8.7% year on year, the sharpest rise since the summer of 2022. The national living wage went up on the 1st of April. Business rates changed. Employer NICs went up. And the FSB is reporting that 41% of retail businesses are now planning to close, downsize, or scale back operations over the coming year.

If you run a small business, your margins just got thinner. And if you have not raised your prices in the last six months, they might already be gone.

This is the part where most business owners freeze. Raising prices feels dangerous. You worry about losing customers, looking greedy, or pricing yourself out of the market. So you absorb the costs, work harder, and hope it sorts itself out.

It does not sort itself out. It gets worse.

The maths is simple#

If your costs have gone up by 5-10% and you have not changed your prices, you are making less money on every job, every order, every project. You are effectively giving yourself a pay cut.

Some of that is obvious: fuel, materials, energy. Some of it is hidden: higher wages for staff, more expensive insurance, the employment law changes that came in on the 6th of April, software subscriptions that crept up in January. Add it all together and you might find you are working as hard as last year for noticeably less.

The FSB's most recent Small Business Index put confidence at -53 in Q1 2026. That is 18 points up from the historic low at the end of 2025, but it is still firmly negative. The number one reason? Costs that keep rising while prices stay flat.

Most small businesses wait too long#

The businesses that handle price increases well tend to do it early, clearly, and without drama. The ones that struggle are the ones that wait until they are desperate, then panic-raise by 20% and lose half their customers overnight.

If you need to raise prices, do it now. Do it by a modest amount. And do it properly.

"Properly" means three things.

Tell people before it happens. Not the day before. Give existing customers a week or two of notice. An email is enough. Something like: "From [date], our prices are going up by [amount]. Here is why. If you want to book at the current rate, you have until [date]."

That is honest. It gives people a reason. And it often generates a rush of bookings at the old price, which cushions the transition.

Do not apologise. You are not doing anything wrong. Your costs went up. Your prices are going up. That is how business works. Apologising signals that you think you are overcharging, which makes customers think it too.

State it plainly. "Our costs have increased significantly this year, particularly fuel and materials. We are adjusting our prices from [date] to reflect that." Done.

Update your website. This is the bit most people forget. You send the email, you tell regulars in person, but your website still shows the old prices. Then a new customer lands on your site, sees the old number, calls you, and the first thing you say is "actually, it is more than that now."

That is a terrible first impression. And it wastes both your time.

How to update pricing on your site#

If your site shows specific prices, change them. If it shows ranges, check the ranges still work. If it says "from £X", make sure X is still realistic.

We wrote about how to show pricing on your website a couple of months ago. The short version: your pricing page should help the right customer self-qualify. If the numbers on the page no longer reflect reality, the page is not doing its job.

A few things worth getting right when you update.

Do not show "was/now" pricing. Crossing out an old price and showing a new one makes you look like a discount retailer. It also invites people to wait for the next deal. If you are raising prices permanently, just show the new price.

Check every page, not just the pricing page. A lot of small business sites mention prices in blog posts, service pages, FAQs, or Google Business Profile descriptions. If those are out of date, they create confusion. A customer who finds "from £50" in a blog post and "from £65" on the pricing page will not trust either number.

Update your Google Business Profile. If you list prices or price ranges there, they need to match your website. Mismatched numbers between Google and your site look sloppy at best and dishonest at worst.

What about losing customers?#

You will lose some. That is normal.

The customers you lose when you raise prices by 5-10% are almost always the ones who were only with you because of price. They are the ones who haggle, pay late, complain the most, and refer nobody. Losing them is not a disaster. It is a filter.

The customers who value what you do, who have a relationship with you, who know what good looks like, will not leave over a modest increase. They expect costs to go up. They are probably raising their own prices too.

If you lose a significant chunk of your customer base after a small increase, that is actually telling you something important: your positioning was wrong. You were competing on price, not on value. That is a problem worth solving, but not by keeping your prices artificially low.

What if you sell online?#

If you run an e-commerce site, the mechanics are slightly different. You cannot easily email every potential customer. But you can:

• Update your prices and move on. Most customers will not notice a 5-10% increase on individual products.
• If you are making a larger increase, add a short banner explaining why. "Prices updated April 2026 to reflect increased material and shipping costs." Keep it factual. One sentence is enough.
• Check that your margins still work after platform fees, payment processing, and shipping. A price increase that gets eaten by Stripe and Royal Mail is not a price increase.

The real risk is not raising them#

The businesses that go under in a cost crunch are rarely the ones that raised prices too aggressively. They are the ones that absorbed everything, told themselves they would sort it out next quarter, and ran out of runway before next quarter arrived.

Your prices are not a promise to never change. They are a reflection of what it costs to deliver something good. When those costs go up, the price goes up. Your customers understand this. They are dealing with the same pressures.

If you have not reviewed your pricing since last year, this week is a good time to do it. Check the numbers on your site, send a clear email to your regulars, and move on. The businesses that adjust early and communicate clearly will come out of this in better shape than the ones that freeze and hope for the best.