An influencer exclusivity clause stops you from taking paid work from competing brands for a set period, usually a day or two around a post or 30 to 90 days after a campaign goes live. It is separate from usage rights, it should carry its own fee, and in India a window that runs past the end of the agreement may not be enforceable at all. Here is what each type restricts, how long it should run, what it adds to your rate, and a clause you can paste.
The brand's reason is fair: it does not want its reel sitting between two rivals on your grid. Your reason to price it is just as fair: every week you are locked out of a category is a week of deals you cannot take. The clause is worth signing once both sides have put a number on that.
What does an exclusivity clause actually restrict?
One of three things, and the first job is to find out which. Competitor exclusivity blocks a list of named brands. Category exclusivity blocks a whole product category. Full exclusivity blocks all paid partnerships, whatever the industry. A fourth variation limits any of these to one platform, so an Instagram clause leaves your YouTube deals alone.
InfluencerFee's guide to exclusivity pricing, reviewed 12 October 2026, calls category exclusivity the baseline for most pricing and describes full exclusivity as rare, mostly limited to celebrity-tier ambassadors. Modash's guide for brands, published 21 September 2026, describes the common pattern as one or two days of full exclusivity around the post, followed by a longer category window.
The definition of the category decides everything. "No other beauty brands" locks a skincare creator out of haircare, makeup, fragrance and supplements. "No other serum or moisturiser brands" protects the product the brand is paying for and nothing else. A lawyer at Sharma Kemp Chambers, writing for Global Law Experts on 11 September 2026, describes a creator who agreed to a six-month exclusivity clause without realising it and lost a larger deal to it, and another clause that ran six months across every platform, worldwide. Ask for the competitor list in writing before you ask about the fee.
How long should exclusivity last?
For a single post, a couple of days on either side. For a campaign, 30 to 90 days of category exclusivity counted from the day the content goes live. For an ambassador programme, the length of the contract. Anything longer than the campaign it protects is the brand buying your calendar, not protecting a launch.
The brand-side sources agree on the short end. Modash quotes a former FARFETCH marketer who asks for a 48-hour competitor window either side of the post date and calls one to two days the minimum for category exclusivity; a children's app marketer in the same piece asks for 24 hours before and after a post plus one month of category exclusivity once the content is live; the guide calls two to seven days normal in most categories. InfluencerFee's table gives 30 to 90 days for one-off posts, 60 to 90 days for a three-post campaign, and the contract term plus 30 to 60 days for ambassadors.
Two mechanics matter more than the number. Start the clock at the publish date, not the signing date, or a brand that takes six weeks to approve a draft has you locked out before you have earned anything. And fix the end date in writing. "For the duration of the partnership" has no end, and "any similar brand" has no edge.
What does an exclusivity clause cost?
Between 20 and 50 percent of the content fee for 30 days of category exclusivity in the published guides, past 100 percent at six months, and more again if the restricted category is where most of your income comes from. No page we read publishes a survey behind its table; these are practitioner rates, which is why the method in the next section matters more than any one number.
upGrowth's influencer pricing guide for India, updated 16 September 2026, is the only one of these written for Indian rates, and it adds a sentence worth keeping: if the contract is silent, assume there is no exclusivity. The Modash guide quotes a creator monetisation coach at 10 to 15 percent of the base rate per 30 days for easy categories and about 50 percent per month for hard ones, a food creator who charges her full base rate for every month of category exclusivity, and a beauty creator with a fixed minimum for any exclusivity at all. Toptal's creator-side guide, written by a creator with about 170,000 followers and six years of brand deals, carries the same bands as InfluencerFee and adds a floor: ask for at least 20 percent.
How do you work out your own number?
Price the deals you will lose, then compare that with the percentage tables and quote the higher one. InfluencerFee and Toptal both describe the method: estimate your monthly income from the restricted category, multiply by the number of months, and take 70 to 90 percent of it, because you would not have landed every one of those deals anyway.
Here is what it looks like at live Indian rates. On 13 October 2026, 547 creators with at least 1,000 followers, synced to Qolab in the previous 30 days, had a reel rate on their public profile. The median asking rate was ₹1,169 for 1,000 to 10,000 followers (304 creators), ₹4,594 for 10,000 to 50,000 (158), ₹7,880 for 50,000 to 250,000 (68) and ₹27,091 above that (17). These are asking prices creators set, not negotiated outcomes.
Take a 25,000-follower skincare creator at the micro median, reel ₹4,600. A serum brand asks for 90 days of skincare exclusivity.
- **Percentage tables.** InfluencerFee's 50 to 75 percent gives ₹2,300 to ₹3,450. upGrowth's 80 to 150 percent gives ₹3,680 to ₹6,900.
- **Opportunity cost.** She normally lands one skincare deal a month at about her reel rate. Three months, times ₹4,600, times 0.8, is ₹11,040.
The gap is the whole point. The percentage tables assume the locked category is one slice of a creator's income. For a niche creator it is most of it, and a 90-day skincare lock on a skincare creator costs two to four times what the tables say. Her honest counter is one of two things: the ₹11,000 figure as a separate line, or a shorter and narrower clause, 30 days against named serum brands, which brings the lost-deal estimate down to about ₹3,700 and lets the deal close.
At the nano median the arithmetic goes the other way. On a ₹1,169 reel, 30 days of category exclusivity at upGrowth's 30 to 50 percent is ₹350 to ₹585. A 48-hour window either side of the post is reasonable to include in the base price; charge for anything longer, and do not let a clause that earns ₹400 lock a month of your calendar.
Is an exclusivity clause enforceable in India?
During the term of the agreement, generally yes. After the agreement ends, generally no. Section 27 of the Indian Contract Act, 1872 says that every agreement by which anyone is restrained from exercising a lawful profession, trade or business of any kind is, to that extent, void, with a single exception for the sale of a business's goodwill.
The case to know is about an endorsement contract. In Percept D'Mark (India) v Zaheer Khan, decided by the Supreme Court on 22 March 2006, the cricketer's promotion agreement ran from 30 October 2000 to 29 October 2003 and gave the agency a right to match any endorsement offer he received. When he signed a similar agreement with another party in November 2003, the agency sought to enforce that clause after its own term had ended. The Court held that a restrictive covenant extending beyond the term of the contract is void and not enforceable, and that neither the test of reasonableness nor the principle of a restraint being partial applies outside the statutory exception. A 2018 column on Casemine traces the other half of the rule to Niranjan Shankar Golikari v Century Spinning, 1967, where the Court upheld an exclusivity obligation that operated during the term of the contract.
What that means at your desk is narrower than it sounds. A brand that wants 90 days after the post will usually draft the agreement's term to run 90 days past the live date, so the exclusivity sits inside the term and the Zaheer Khan rule does not reach it. A clause that bites after the agreement has expired is the one the Court called void. And a void clause is not a free pass: a brand can still withhold a balance, terminate, or sue for breach long before any court looks at Section 27, and in January 2025 Gymshark asked the High Court in London for an injunction against a 22-year-old powerlifter over a three-month post-contract non-compete, as Marketing Beat reported; the outcome was not in the coverage we read. TrailBlazer Advocates, writing on Mondaq in January 2023, gives the drafting rule Indian lawyers apply: the term must not be unreasonable, and the exclusivity should be limited to the product or service being advertised, and that creators should be especially careful with these clauses when dealing with FMCG companies.
The clause to paste
Here is a creator-friendly version you can send back when a brand's draft says only "exclusivity: 3 months". Every blank is a term from the sections above.
“Category exclusivity. From the date the content goes live until [date, 30 days later], the Creator will not publish paid promotion on Instagram for [named brands, or: brands whose main product is a face serum or moisturiser]. This does not cover unpaid mentions, deals already agreed and listed below, or any other platform. Exclusivity fee: ₹[amount], in addition to the content fee and payable with it. If the content goes live late for reasons on the Brand's side, the window still ends on the date above. If either party ends this agreement early, the exclusivity ends with it.”
Three things are doing the work. The window has a calendar end date, so a late approval cannot stretch it. The category is defined by product, so the brand gets what it is paying for and nothing wider. And the fee is its own line, so it survives into the invoice instead of disappearing into the content price. If the brand's counter is longer or broader, the sections above give you the number to put against it; our 7 negotiation scripts for raising a rate cover how to say it without losing the deal.
What does a Qolab booking say about exclusivity?
Nothing, and that is deliberate. The e-signed booking agreement every deal runs on covers the deliverables and dates, the payment held until delivery, draft review, the paid partnership label, conduct, a usage line (the brand may reshare the content with credit, in India, for 12 months, and anything more needs your separate written consent) and disputes. There is no exclusivity clause in it, so a Qolab booking carries no exclusivity unless the brand writes it into the brief and you price it in your counter-offer.
That split is the right one to copy into any deal. Usage and exclusivity are different sales: usage is what the brand may do with your content, exclusivity is what you may not do with your calendar. Our guide to usage rights and whitelisting prices the first; this post prices the second; and your rate card should carry one line for each so neither is assumed for free. Brands reading along: the same three answers (which type, how long, how much) belong in the brief before the first message, and our 11-point influencer brief has the slot for them.
If you would rather have the terms attached to the number before a brand ever asks, a creator account on Qolab gives you a public rate card with the usage window already written in, no exclusivity unless you agree to it in the thread, and the full payment held until your content is live.
