The design invoice is the cheap part

A rebrand costs a lot more than just the design invoice. In the most detailed public breakdown we’ve found, design was 30% of the bill and rollout was the other 70%. And none of the public disclosures we’ve found count the hours a company’s own people put in, not to mention the risk of a rebrand going wrong.

The one rebrand with a full receipt

Private companies don’t usually publish what their rebrands cost. Governments sometimes have to.

When ACTEW, a government-owned water utility, renamed itself Icon Water, the government tabled the final bill: $574,286. And they broke out the cost lines.

Seven of every ten dollars went to putting the new name on things. Based on my experience, that strikes me as a good estimate of the split.

A utility has trucks and uniforms. Your firm might not, so your split won’t exactly match. But you have your own assets: the website, every proposal template and sales deck, email signatures, contracts, invoices, LinkedIn pages, trade show booths, the product screens and the sign on the door. Somebody changes every one of them, checks them, and then finds the ones they missed.

The line nobody writes down

Look at what a public body reports when someone asks what a rename cost. A New Zealand city council estimated $23,600, with the design “undertaken by staff within normal working hours.”

None of that time is free. No study puts a number on it, so this one is our estimate, and only ours: a rename at a 25-person firm eats about 150 leadership hours. At $250 an hour, that’s $37,500 of time from the people who are supposed to be selling and running the place. And that’s before you count what they didn’t get done.

Getting it wrong costs twice

Cracker Barrel’s new logo lasted from August 19 to August 26, 2025. And its CEO later said traffic was down about 8% since the change, though the logo wasn’t the only thing customers were angry about. Gap’s new logo lasted about a week in 2010. Royal Mail spent £2.5 million to become Consignia, then £1 million to change back after a public outcry.

None of them is a B2B firm. They’re here because they’re the ones with public numbers we can share.

Your website is on the bill too

If the rebrand comes with a new domain, add search traffic to the cost. Google’s own guidance says that if you move domains and redesign the site’s content and structure at the same time, “you will probably see some traffic loss.” Google carries your old site’s search signals over for 180 days after the move is registered, and asks you to keep the redirects in place at least that long. And we don’t know yet what a move does to AI search.

So keep the domain if you can. If you can’t, don’t rebuild the site in the same move.

So what should a rebrand cost?

Nobody can give you a full answer. The price ranges floating around online are agency claims with no real method behind them. The only honest answer is yours, and it has five lines.

1. Fees: the agency, the naming work, legal and trademark.

2. Rollout: every place the old name lives. Count them. The list is longer than you think.

3. Organizational focus: leadership and sales hours, retraining and internal communications, at what an hour of those people is worth.

4. Brand confusion: customers who can’t find you, and their accounts payable systems still set up under the old name. Nobody has measured this yet for B2B firms, at least not that I’ve found. That doesn’t make it zero.

5. Lost recognition: what customers already call you. About two months after Twitter became X, 69% of US X users still called it Twitter. I know I sure do.

Add all that up. Then ask whether the upside pays that back within 24 months. That’s the risk appetite I would suggest, not a research finding. You’re welcome to pick your own. If you can’t write the upside down as a number, you’re probably not ready to spend yet.

The math isn’t complicated. Writing down a number you’re willing to be held to is the hard part.

If you want a second set of eyes on yours, the Rebrand Check is free. Send us the proposal and you’ll get a one-pager in 48 hours.