What to do when a client ghosts you
When a client ghosts you mid-project, the short version is this: pause the work and in writing, invoice what is done if your agreement allows it, release the slot on a stated date, and close the file with the door priced and open. Ghosting is usually chaos, not malice — a job changed, a manager changed, a budget froze — but your calendar cannot run on usually. What follows is the ladder: four short messages across about a month, and the discipline of sending nothing in between. Where it touches unpaid invoices or ownership, it is general information, not legal advice: your agreement governs.
1. Name which ghost you have
“Ghosting” covers three different silences, and they do not deserve the same response. Name yours before you answer it: a debt ladder run on a prospect, or a gentle nudge sent to a client who owes you a milestone, both miss.
The pre-deposit ghost. Nothing is signed, no deposit has moved, no work exists: the enquiry or the proposal went quiet. This silence already has a play — the three-message ladder in how to follow up on a proposal. Two or three touches across a fortnight, then close the file and mean it. The machinery below is for relationships that started.
The mid-project ghost. The agreement is signed and work is under way — and the replies stop. Inputs never arrive, a review round sits unopened, a milestone goes unpaid and unmentioned. This guide is built for this silence: real work exists, real money is partly in motion, and every quiet week costs you a slot you could have sold.
The final-invoice ghost. The work was delivered and accepted, the final invoice is ageing, and the quiet is about payment. That is non-payment, not this ladder, and what to do when a client won’t pay covers it — the final notice, the formal routes, choosing by the amount. What follows assumes the project itself is still open.
2. The ladder: four messages, four dates
The response is a ladder, not a chase: four short messages, each dated, each written to stand until the next date arrives. The days are a rhythm, not a law — stretch them for a large organisation’s pace, compress them for small work — but keep the order and keep the gaps. Between rungs, your move is also silence: a ladder with extra messages squeezed between its rungs is just chasing with better stationery.
Day 0 — the pause. The day the silence is real — a promised input a week overdue is a fair trigger — the work stops, and the client hears it from you, in writing:
The template runs to 62 words. Note what it does not contain: no complaint, no deadline, no fee talk — just the pause made official and the restart one reply away. Most returns happen at this rung, the one that costs the client least.
About day 7 — the value reminder. One short message whose subject is the work, not the silence: what is finished and sitting ready, named concretely — drafts completed, stage reached, the thing they already own part of. You are reminding them the project is an asset mid-build, not a subscription they forgot to cancel. Attach nothing new, offer nothing extra, discount nothing. If inputs are what is missing, name the exact input that restarts the machine.
About day 14 — the formal line. The register changes: this message states the position. If your agreement allows invoicing for work completed to date, the invoice for the work-to-date goes out with it, on your normal payment terms, and the message says what happens to the files and the slot while the project is paused. If the agreement is silent, invoice what it does allow and state the rest plainly instead. This is the rung where the episode stops being a delay and becomes a record.
About day 30 — the closing letter. Short, warm, final: the project is closed as of today, the work-to-date position is settled or invoiced, the files are archived, and the door is open on stated terms — a restart is booked, joining the queue at the current rates on your rate card. The closing letter is the most important message in the ladder, because it is the one that gives the silence an ending you chose.
3. The money and the files
Settle what is settleable. Invoice for the work completed up to the pause date, exactly as your agreement’s payment terms describe — stage reached, milestone met, hours logged . If a deposit was taken, apply it against that invoice and show the arithmetic: deposit received, work completed, the balance either way. Our guide to freelance deposits and upfront payments exists so this moment is a subtraction, not an argument — the ghost is the client the deposit was invented for.
The files divide cleanly at the paid line. Whatever the client has paid for — outright, or through the deposit applied — is theirs: deliver it in usable form, as you would in any project handover document. The rest is archived with the project record: the brief, the agreement, the ladder messages, the work, kept the way your documented processes keep every project’s file. That archive is what lets a restart, a dispute or a tax question be answered from paper a year later.
Two failure modes flank that line. Holding work the client has paid for — hostage to a mood — converts a clean position into a dispute about you. Releasing unpaid work to end the awkwardness teaches the silence that it worked. The line is the whole ethics here: paid means delivered, unpaid means archived, and the agreement — not the emotion of the month — decides which is which. General information, again, not legal advice: where ownership is genuinely contested, that is a lawyer’s question.
4. Protecting the calendar
A ghost does not only owe money; it holds a chair. The slot stays soft-held until about day 7 — blocked in pencil, promised to nobody — and becomes bookable from the value reminder on. If a waitlist exists, the released slot is offered in order, as the booked-out and waitlist rules describe: the ghost’s possible return does not outrank a waiting client’s patience. If the client resurfaces later, they rejoin as new work — the next section — not as a reservation that survived.
Record the episode where you track work, not where you vent about it. Following tracking leads in a spreadsheet, the project is marked with its status and the restart note — paused day 0, closed day 30, the deposit position, the files archived — one factual line a future you can act on. Memory edits; the sheet does not.
And run the number the episode is about. A ghosted project that was a third of your income is not an admin problem; it is the client concentration checker arriving early with its lesson — one client’s chaos became your quarter’s hole. The fix is structural, and later: a wider base of clients. But measure it the week it happens, while the size of the hole is still exact.
5. When they resurface
They often do — months later, cheerful, as if the thread simply paused. Receive it graciously and administer it firmly. There is no guilt invoice and no grudge discount: the restart is new work, opened with a project brief that re-confirms scope, inputs and dates, priced from the current rate card, and held with a deposit. Most returning ghosts are perfectly good second clients. The terms are not punishment; they are simply the standard door, walked through again.
One pattern earns a no — or at least a priced one: the emergency resurrection. Their deadline is desperate, your weekend is requested, and the same silence is scheduled for after delivery. That is rush work wearing an apology: it is quoted at rush terms, with payment structured up front, or it is declined with the same warmth as any other no.
Finally, log the episode in the record your client list audit reads: the dates, the amounts, how it ended. A client who ghosted once and returned well is a normal entry. A client ghosting a second time is a pattern, and patterns get priced — larger deposits, shorter milestones, or a polite permanent no. The record is what turns one bad month into a permanent improvement in your terms.
Questions
Related: the silence, the money and the door
If the work was delivered and only the money is missing, go to what to do when a client won’t pay. If nothing was ever signed, the proposal follow-up ladder is the whole play. The handover document is the format that keeps paid-for work deliverable and archived work findable. And if the client has not vanished but simply stopped moving — replies arriving, inputs never landing — that is a stall, not a ghost: what to do when a project stalls on the client runs the two-door conversation and the formal pause.