What a logo costs in Ireland, and what you get for each price

If one designer quoted you 200 euro and another quoted 8,000 for what looks like the same job, you're not going mad. Logo design cost in Ireland runs from about 50 euro to 15,000, and either end can be the correct number depending on what you need.

The gap has little to do with the drawing and everything to do with what sits around it. Below are the four price tiers you'll meet in practice, what each one buys, and how to tell a cheap file from an identity that still holds up in five years.

One piece of context first. The Central Statistics Office reports that SMEs make up 99.8% of active enterprises in Ireland (CSO, Business in Ireland 2020), and most of those businesses pay for a logo once or twice in their whole lifetime.

50 to 300 euro: a single file

At the bottom of the range you're buying a picture. Fiverr, a logo generator, a template marketplace, or a mate who's handy in Canva. You send a brief, a nicely rendered PNG comes back, and for a lot of businesses that's enough to start trading.

Be clear about what's missing. No research. No exploration of alternatives, and usually no ownership of the underlying design, so you get one lockup that's often built on a stock icon forty other companies are also using.

You won't get a vector master either. The first time a sign-maker asks for an EPS, or a printer needs the mark at two metres wide on the side of a van, you're paying someone else to rebuild from scratch what you thought you'd already bought.

For a sole trader testing an idea this weekend, that's a sensible place to start. Treat it as a placeholder.

300 to 1,500 euro: a freelancer who thinks about it

Here you cross from a file into a piece of work. A freelance designer or a junior at a studio spends real hours on it. You get a proper brief, two or three routes to choose from, a couple of revision rounds & the correct file formats.

Those formats matter more than people expect, because a logo that only exists as a 2000 pixel PNG will fail you at the two moments that count: scaled up for signage, and shrunk to a 32 pixel favicon. This is the tier most Irish micro-businesses should aim for when budget is tight but standards aren't. A café, a trades company, a physio clinic.

What you still won't get is a system. One good mark, delivered well, with little guidance on how it behaves across a website, a van, a menu & an Instagram grid.

1,500 to 6,000 euro: a small identity from a studio

Now you're paying for thinking rather than execution. A studio starts with your business instead of your logo. Who you're talking to, who you're up against, what you want people to feel. The mark comes out of that, which is why it tends to survive contact with the real world.

At this level you get a kit rather than a single image. A primary logo and its variations, a colour palette with exact values, two or three typefaces, spacing rules, and a short guide so whoever touches the brand next doesn't wreck it.

The mark is the signature at the bottom of the letter. What people respond to is everything the signature is standing on, which is the part this tier finally pays for.

Choosing between the mark and the thinking behind it is its own decision, and we wrote about that call in brand strategy or brand identity, which one your business needs first. Read it before you brief anyone.

6,000 to 15,000 euro: a full identity system

At the top, the word logo undersells what you're commissioning. You're commissioning an identity system, and the mark is one component of it, which is the right call for businesses living across many surfaces at once: retail chains, hospitality groups, funded startups, anyone rolling out to multiple locations or answering to investors.

Expect discovery and strategy up front, several considered directions, and a full toolkit at the end. Logo suite, typography, colour, photography direction, iconography, layout rules, motion in some cases, and a real guidelines document. It's a lot of paper.

You're paying for consistency at scale, and for the senior hours that make a hundred different applications feel like one company. For most SMEs this tier is overkill until it suddenly isn't, and the tell is when your brand is being applied by people you've never met, in rooms you're not in.

Why an identical-looking logo can cost ten times more

Two logos can look like cousins and be priced a decade apart, and the difference is almost never the shape. Six things move the number.

Research, positioning and audience work take days and shape everything downstream, so a quote that skips them starts lower. Cheap work shows you the first idea. Considered work shows you the best of ten. A PNG is a file; a full set of vectors, colour specs, type and rules for every surface is a system.

Ownership is the one people miss. You either own the design outright or you licensed a stock asset dressed up as bespoke. Only one of those survives a trademark check.

The last two are who does the work and what you keep afterwards. A weekend template competes against senior studio time and a process that stands behind the result, and an empty inbox competes against a guidelines document that holds the brand together long after the invoice is paid.

Most rebrands we get called into start the same way. Someone bought the drawing, skipped the system, and it stopped holding the business together the moment it started to grow.

If you want to talk through which tier your business needs, get in touch and we'll give you a straight answer. For the wider picture on how identity works, our branding and identity in Ireland guide is the place to start.