Freelance contract generator

How to use it

1. Fill in the client and the contractor.
2. Describe the scope of work in enough detail that a stranger could tell when it is done.
3. Set the rate, how it is charged, payment terms and notice.
4. Type the governing law, then save it as a PDF to sign.

A template, not legal advice

This is a template assembled from the answers you gave. It is information, not legal advice, and no lawyer has reviewed it. Laws differ by country, state and industry, and requirements that apply to you may be missing from it. Have it reviewed by a qualified lawyer for your own jurisdiction and circumstances before you rely on it.

The contractor clause, and what it cannot do

Saying so in a contract does not settle it. Whether someone is an employee or an independent contractor is decided by the facts of the working relationship — who controls the work, who carries the financial risk, how exclusive and how long-running it is — under the test that applies where the work is done. A written label carries little weight against those facts, and getting it wrong can leave the client owing back taxes, contributions and penalties. Take advice if there is any doubt.

This is the most misunderstood paragraph in freelance contracts. The agreement says the contractor is not an employee, because it should say so — but a great many people believe that sentence settles the question, and it does not. Tax authorities and tribunals look at how the work is really carried out: who controls it, who carries the risk, whose equipment, how exclusive, how long-running. A label that contradicts the facts loses to the facts.

Ownership transfers on payment, not on delivery

The clause here assigns rights in the deliverables to the client when the invoice is paid in full, and leaves them with the contractor until then. That is the freelancer-protective default, and it is the fairer starting point: work handed over and not paid for should not already belong to the person who has not paid for it.

The contractor also keeps ownership of anything made beforehand or independently — their own libraries, templates and methods — and licenses the client to use those as far as the deliverables require. Without that split, a literal reading of an assignment clause hands over a freelancer’s entire toolkit.

Scope is the clause that prevents the argument

Nearly every freelance dispute is a scope dispute. Write what is being delivered, to what standard and by when, in enough detail that a stranger could tell whether it had been done. Anything not in that box is outside the agreement, which is what makes it possible to say that a new request is new work.