Why "Charge Your Worth" Is Rooted in White Supremacy (And What to Do Instead)
Everyone who runs a business has, at some point, been told to “charge your worth.”
It sounded like empowerment. Maybe it even felt like it for a minute.
I've been sitting with why that phrase bothers me so much. And I think I finally have the words for it.
Your worth is not a number
Your hourly rate has nothing to do with your value as a human being.
When someone tells you to "charge your worth," they're assuming that human beings have a monetary value, and that some people are worth more than others.
Isabel Wilkerson writes about this in Caste — how societies assign value to human beings based on categories, and build entire systems to enforce those hierarchies. The wellness industry inherited this too. And when people tell you to "charge your worth" — they're asking you to participate in a system that has historically told certain bodies and certain kinds of work that they are worth less.
*Isabel Wilkerson writes about this in Caste — get it from an indie bookstore via Bookshop.org
The guilt you feel about your rates isn't a mindset problem. It's a completely rational response to a broken framework.
Care work has always been undervalued 💛
This isn't a coincidence.
Healing work. Care work. Work done by women, by people of color, by LGBTQIA practitioners. Chronically, structurally, historically undervalued.
The answer isn't to "step into your value." The answer is to stop tying your worth to your rate entirely, and build your pricing on something more solid. Something that has nothing to do with how you feel about yourself.
Find your enough number 🧮
Here's the question I actually find useful: NOT what are you worth, but what do you need?
What would it take to pay your bills, save a little for a bad month and for retirement, and still have something left over for the things that make your life enjoyable: the coffee, the dinner out, the vacation that is a genuine nervous system requirement?
That's your enough number. Here's how to find it.
💸 Add up what you actually need each month.
Not just rent and utilities. Everything: groceries, health insurance, medications, childcare, debt payments, the therapy that keeps you functional, the vet bill that will eventually happen. Include a dinner out. A few small pleasures. One thing that is just for you. This isn't indulgence. It's sustainability math.
🌧️ Add a rainy day buffer.
A slow month will come. Build it in now, not as a crisis response. Even $200 a month into a savings account changes how a hard month hits.
📅 Figure out your real capacity — based on your worst week.
Not your best week. Not the week when you're energized and everything goes right. Your worst week. The week when the chronic illness flares, or the kids are home sick, or the grief comes back, or your nervous system just says no more.
How many clients can you actually hold that week?
➗ Then divide.
Monthly enough number ÷ realistic monthly client hours = your floor rate.
That's the minimum. The number below which the math stops working, the resentment quietly builds, and the burnout is only a matter of time.
This has nothing to do with your worth. It's just the number. And it exists whether or not you feel confident enough to charge it yet.
What changes when the math works ✨
When you charge what you actually need, something shifts.
You don't keep your rates low hoping it makes you more ‘accessible’ (while running yourself into the ground).
You show up whole. Because the math works. Because the practice sustains you.
Which is the only way to keep sustaining everyone else.
If you want help doing this math — or figuring out the structure underneath your pricing — that's exactly where we start inside of Rooted.
Or start with a Clarity Session and we'll figure out where the numbers are breaking down.
Want more of this? 🌿
Every Sunday I send one small thing — a reflection, a reframe, a piece of anti-capitalist business thinking for wellness practitioners who are done doing it the hard way.
No hustle. No spam. Just one thing that might actually help.
