Freelance rate calculator
Turn the income you want into the rate you have to charge — counting the hours nobody pays for.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you paste is uploaded or stored.
After tax, in your pocket — the salary you are replacing.
Holiday, illness, and the weeks nobody books you.
A realistic range for an established freelancer with steady work.
46 working weeks × 40 hours = 1840 hours at your desk, of which 1104 can be invoiced. The other 736 hours are real work that nobody pays for directly — they are paid for by the rate.
Why the obvious calculation ruins freelancers
Dividing $60,000 by 1840 hours gives $33 an hour. That figure ignores tax, business costs and every unbillable hour — it is 61% below what you actually need to charge.
What this tool does
It converts the income you want to keep into the rate you have to charge, by walking through the three things that separate the two: tax, business costs, and the hours you work but cannot invoice.
That last one is where most freelance pricing fails. Forty hours a week for forty-six weeks is 1,840 hours at your desk. At a realistic 60% billable share, only about 1,100 of them produce an invoice. The rest — proposals, calls that go nowhere, bookkeeping, chasing payment, learning the thing the client needs — is real work funded entirely by the rate charged on the other hours.
The arithmetic, in order
- Start from what you want to keep. Not revenue — the number that reaches your account.
- Gross it up for tax. Divide by one minus your combined rate, because tax is taken from revenue, not added to it.
- Add business costs. Software, hardware, insurance, accountant, coworking, training.
- Divide by billable hours only. Not hours worked. Not hours in a year.
Skip any of these and the answer comes out too low, always in the same direction.
Using the number in a negotiation
Treat the result as a floor rather than a price. It tells you the point below which a project makes you poorer, which is the single most useful thing to know before a call about budget.
Two adjustments are worth making before quoting. Work that is unpleasant, urgent or that blocks your calendar should cost more than the floor. And a long engagement that removes months of sales effort can justify a lower one — the billable share rises when nobody has to be found.
Questions
Why is the rate so much higher than my old salary divided by hours?
Because a salary is the end of the calculation and a freelance rate is the start of it. The rate has to cover tax and contributions you used to have deducted, costs your employer used to pay, holidays and sick days nobody now funds, and every hour spent on sales, admin and invoicing. Three to four times the naive figure is normal, not greedy.
What billable share is realistic?
Between 55% and 70% for an established freelancer with steady work. Below that in the first year, when finding clients takes more time than serving them. Anyone modelling 90% is quietly assuming that proposals, invoices, emails and bookkeeping take no time at all.
Should I quote hourly or daily?
Daily for project work — it protects you from the client who wants to buy ninety minutes, and it prices the switching cost of a fragmented day. Hourly for support and maintenance, where the work genuinely arrives in small pieces. The day rate here is eight hours, so adjust if your standard day is different.
How do I account for tax?
Enter the combined share of revenue that goes to income tax plus social contributions in your country. It is deliberately a single blunt percentage — precise treatment depends on your legal form and jurisdiction, and the point of this number is to set a floor for negotiation, not to file a return.
Is the result what I should quote?
It is your floor: below it you are working at a loss against your own target. What you actually quote depends on the value of the work and what the market pays, and both can be far above the floor.