As a freelancer, you can (if you wish) add a cancellation fee to your booking in case the client cancels the contract at short notice before the start date.
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You should only use this for long assignments booked well in advance and be reasonable in how you calculate your cancellation fee.
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If you have never applied a cancellation fee before and don't know what it should be, you can use a simple formula to get a ballpark figure based on your rate and the time taken to find a new assignment.
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Cancellation fee = Daily rate x Estimated time taken to find a new assignment
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For example if your day rate is £250, and it will take you approximately 3 days to time a new role, you could set your cancellation fee to £750.
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It’s important to remember that a cancellation fee isn’t a right, you do have to get the client to agree to it. So it’s really important to be reasonable in what you ask for.
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What’s reasonable would depend on the circumstances. So for example, the £750 cancellation fee from that example above would look very reasonable to a client on a booking for a 4 week assignment, but if it was a booking for just a couple of days, then that looks more unreasonable to a client.
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As a rule of thumb, a cancellation fee should never be higher than day rate x number of days in the notice period for the assignment.

The cancellation fee will only apply if the assignment is cancelled – it’s quite possible that a client may ask you to move your dates a little, and that’s up to you and the client to agree. Moving an assignment is not a cancellation.