Independent contractor agreement template
Hire a freelancer, agency or consultant without leaving the important parts to an email. goHeather asks how the work will actually run, builds the agreement around those answers, and flags terms that sit oddly against them.
Any country or jurisdiction you tell it- Ownership of the work settled properly
- Built for wherever the contractor is based
- Every clause explained as you go
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What is a Independent Contractor Agreement?
A contract for a result, not for someone's time
An independent contractor agreement engages a person or business to deliver a defined result — a website, a campaign, a set of drawings — rather than to work for you. The contractor controls how the work gets done, uses their own tools and handles their own taxes. You pay for the deliverable.The document does two jobs. It settles the commercial terms: what is being built, by when, for how much, and who owns it afterwards. And it describes the working relationship, which matters if anyone later asks whether this was really a contractor engagement or an employment one.That second job is where most agreements fall down. A well-built one describes an arrangement that genuinely looks independent. A poor one calls someone a contractor in the title and then sets their hours, supervises their method and puts them at a desk in your office.
What often goes wrong in a contractor agreement
Patterns that come up again and again, and how goHeather handles them.
Using a generic freelance contract
- Set hours and a required desk, in a document that calls the person a contractor
- Work-made-for-hire wording with no assignment behind it
- Sixty or ninety-day payment terms carried over from a supplier contract
- Nothing about the contractor's own tools, so nobody knows what you can keep using
- Termination at will with nothing owed for work already delivered
Building it with goHeather
- goHeather asks how the work is actually run and flags terms that contradict your answers
- An assignment sits behind the ownership wording so the transfer is not left to one phrase
- Payment terms are built for where the contractor is based
- The contractor's own materials are identified and licensed, so you keep using what you need
- Termination sets out what is owed for completed and in-progress work
From blank page to signed contractor agreement
goHeather is not a template download. It is a contract builder that walks you through the document, powered by the latest AI models.
- Start
Start from scratch or from a template
Describe the deal in your own words, or pick a Independent Contractor Agreement template and work from there. Either way goHeather builds the document with you rather than handing you a file to fill in.
- Answer
Answer questions as it drafts
goHeather asks who the parties are, what the deal covers and where you operate, and writes each clause around your answers as you go.
- Review
See every clause explained
Each clause comes with a plain-English summary of what it does, so you know what the document says before you send it.
- Negotiate
Check what comes back
Upload the other side’s edits and goHeather shows each change against the version you sent, flagged by risk.
- Sign
Send it for signature
Collect e-signatures and keep the executed copy, the key dates and the renewal terms in one place.
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Who needs a Independent Contractor Agreement
Where this document usually shows up, and what else goHeather covers there.
- HR
Contingent workers and agencies
Most people ops teams run a contractor population alongside the payroll. Same paper every time, built from the same questions.
See contract AI for HR teams
- Professional services
Associates and specialist subcontractors
Consultancies and agencies subcontract constantly. Make sure what you promise the client is something you actually own.
See contract AI for professional services - Founders
Early contract help
The designer and developer who built your first product may never have signed an assignment. Investors tend to ask about it.
See contract AI for founders - Templates
Every contract template
A contractor agreement is one of twenty contract types goHeather drafts, from NDAs to statements of work.
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A Independent Contractor Agreement carries names, numbers and terms you would not want shared. goHeather protects every document you draft or upload with enterprise-grade controls, end-to-end encryption and trusted AI providers.
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Building a contractor agreement with goHeather
goHeather is a technology company, not a law firm, and this page is not legal advice. It describes what our software does. Nothing here states the law or tells you what your contract needs — for that, talk to an attorney licensed where you operate.
Two things go wrong with contractor agreements more than anything else: the document describes a relationship that is not the one being run, and the business discovers it does not own what it paid for. The sections below cover how goHeather approaches both, plus payment and how to structure repeat engagements.
What goHeather covers in a Independent Contractor Agreement
These are the parts of a Independent Contractor Agreement goHeather asks you about while it builds one, and the parts it looks at when you upload one somebody else sent. It is a description of what the product does — not a checklist for your document, and not a view on what yours needs.
- Scope of work and deliverables. What is being produced, usually in an exhibit so it can be updated without redoing the contract. goHeather flags: a scope written as ongoing availability rather than defined deliverables, which sits oddly in a contractor agreement.
- How the work is performed. Who decides the method, the schedule and the location, and whose equipment is used. goHeather flags: set hours, a required desk or daily supervision in a document that calls the person a contractor.
- Payment terms. The rate or fixed fee, the invoicing cycle, the payment window and how expenses are handled. goHeather flags: long payment windows in an agreement with an individual, since expectations around paying freelancers promptly have tightened in several places.
- Ownership of the deliverables. How the work the contractor produces comes to belong to you. goHeather flags: work-made-for-hire wording with no assignment behind it, which goHeather raises because on its own it may not move everything you expect.
- The contractor's own materials. Tools, libraries or templates the contractor brings with them, and what rights you get to keep using them. goHeather flags: nothing addressing this at all, which can leave you unsure whether you may keep using something the deliverable depends on.
- Confidentiality. What the contractor may do with information they see while working. goHeather flags: a confidentiality clause with no stated purpose, since contractors frequently work for others in the same sector.
- Taxes, insurance and indemnity. Confirmation the contractor handles their own taxes and coverage, and who bears claims arising from the work. goHeather flags: an indemnity with no insurance requirement behind it, which goHeather points out as a practical gap rather than a drafting one.
- Term and termination. How long the engagement runs, how either side ends it, and what is owed for work in progress. goHeather flags: immediate termination with nothing payable for work already delivered, which is a common source of disputes.
- Subcontracting. Whether the contractor may pass the work to someone else, and whether they stay responsible if they do. goHeather flags: silence on the point, which usually means they can, and you may receive deliverables from someone you never assessed.
The questions goHeather asks before it writes anything
goHeather does not start from the fee. It starts by asking how the engagement will actually work, because those answers shape the document and because the gap between what an agreement says and how a relationship runs is where the trouble comes from.
Who decides how the work gets done, and when? Whose laptop, whose software, whose premises? Is this a defined project with deliverables and dates, or is the person expected to be generally available? Can they work for other clients while this runs? Can they send someone else to do it?
Then it writes the document to match, and — this is the useful part — it flags anything that contradicts what you told it. If you described a project engagement and the draft you uploaded sets office hours and a reporting line, goHeather says so. It cannot turn one kind of relationship into another, and it does not pretend to. What it can do is stop the paperwork saying something different from the arrangement.
- Who controls the method, the schedule and the location
- Whose equipment and software the work is done on
- Whether this is a defined project or open-ended availability
- Whether the person works for other clients
- Whether they can subcontract the work
The clause that decides whether the work is yours
This is the one that surprises people. A business commissions a logo, a website or a piece of software, pays the invoice, and assumes it owns the result. The agreement says the deliverables are works made for hire, which sounds conclusive.
goHeather flags that wording when it stands alone, because whether that phrase alone carries ownership of a given deliverable is exactly the kind of thing businesses end up arguing about, and it is cheap to remove the doubt. The fix it builds in is a straightforward one: an assignment sitting behind the work-made-for-hire language, so that anything the first phrase does not carry, the second one does.
It also asks about the other half of the question — what the contractor is bringing with them. Most experienced freelancers arrive with their own libraries, frameworks and templates, and they are not selling you those. goHeather prompts you to identify them and license them, so you can keep using what your deliverable depends on without anyone assuming you bought the contractor's whole toolkit.
For anything where ownership really matters — core product, a brand, anything you would later sell — this is worth confirming with an attorney rather than relying on wording alone.
Why goHeather asks where the contractor is based
Payment terms are one of the places where an agreement written for suppliers gets reused for individuals and does not fit. Sixty or ninety-day terms are ordinary between companies and are a different proposition for a freelancer.
Expectations here have tightened noticeably in a number of places in recent years, and goHeather asks where the contractor is based so it can build to that rather than carrying over whatever the last supplier contract said. It flags long payment windows in agreements with individuals and shows a shorter default beside them.
It also asks about the shape of the money: fixed fee, hourly with a ceiling, or milestones. Each puts the risk of the job taking longer than expected somewhere different, and it is worth choosing deliberately rather than inheriting. Where a fee is hourly with no cap, goHeather points out that there is nothing bounding it.
Structuring it once instead of every project
Most businesses end up using the same few contractors again and again, and end up writing a new full agreement every time — or, more often, not writing one and relying on the first one from two years ago.
goHeather suggests a different shape for anyone you will use repeatedly: a master agreement carrying the terms that do not change — ownership, confidentiality, insurance, indemnity, termination — with each project described in its own short statement of work underneath it. New project, new SOW, same terms.
That takes a day the first time and about ten minutes thereafter. It also means the ownership and confidentiality terms are consistent across every engagement with that person, rather than varying depending on which file someone copied. goHeather can build both documents and keeps them together.
Why goHeather asks how the work is actually run
Whether someone is genuinely an independent contractor is not settled by the title on the agreement — it depends on how the relationship works in practice, and different authorities look at it differently. That is why goHeather asks about the working arrangement rather than just the fee: who decides how and when the work happens, whose equipment is used, whether the person works for others, and whether the engagement is a defined project or open-ended availability. It builds the agreement to those answers and flags terms that sit oddly against them, such as set hours or a required desk in a document that calls someone a contractor. What it cannot do is make the arrangement into something it is not, and it will not tell you how a given engagement would be classified. Where there is any doubt, that is a question for an employment attorney before the engagement starts, not after.
Before you go. goHeather is a technology company, not a law firm. We do not provide legal advice, legal opinions, or any view on whether a contract or a clause will hold up. Everything above describes what our software does when you build or upload a document. Rules differ from state to state and change over time, and what is right for your business depends on facts we do not have. Have an attorney licensed where you operate review anything that matters.
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contractor agreement template questions
What people ask before they build a Independent Contractor Agreement.
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