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Billable Hours Calculator

Forty working hours is not forty billable hours. Work out how many client hours a week you can genuinely sell, and what that caps your year at.

Your numbers

Everything stays in your browser. Results update as you type.

Your week

Working hours per week

Everything you spend on the business, billable or not.

Weeks off per year

Holiday, public holidays, illness and the quiet weeks between engagements.

Where the non-billable time goes

Split it out rather than guessing a total. Most freelancers under-count this by half.

Admin

Invoicing, bookkeeping, email, file management, chasing payments.

Sales and business development

Proposals, discovery calls, pitches, marketing, the projects you do not win.

Internal meetings

Calls that are not billed to a specific project.

Learning and training

Keeping current. Unpaid, and the first thing to disappear when you are busy.

Other non-billable

Anything else: your own site, community work, tooling.

Capacity buffer

Slack for the weeks that go wrong. 10–15% is realistic; zero assumes every estimate above is exact.

Optional: money

Leave both empty to get the hours on their own.

Currency

Changes how results are displayed. No conversion is applied.

Target annual revenue (optional)

Shows the average rate you would have to hold to reach it at this capacity.

Average hourly rate (optional)

Shows what a fully booked year at this capacity would be worth.

Safe billable hours

25.2h/week

Out of 40h worked. That is 96.6h a month and 1,159.2h across 46 working weeks.

Per month: 96.6h
Per year: 1,159.2h
Utilisation: 63%
Working weeks: 46

Where your week goes

Billable25.2h
Buffer2.8h
Admin4h
Sales4h
Meetings2h
Learning2h

Non-billable hours12h/week

Held back as buffer2.8h/week

Note: A 63% utilisation is the share of your working year that turns into invoices. Sold hours, not worked hours, are what your rate has to cover.

What this calculator does

It answers the question every rate and every revenue target depends on: how many client hours can you realistically sell?

Forty working hours does not mean forty billable hours. Sales, project admin, meetings, keeping your skills current and time off all reduce the number of hours you can actually put on an invoice. A freelancer selling 25 hours a week at full utilisation is doing well; a business plan built on 40 is a business plan built on a number that has never existed.

How the calculation works

nonBillable = admin + sales + meetings + learning + other

rawClientHours = max(0, workingHours − nonBillable)

safeBillable = rawClientHours × (1 − capacityBuffer)

workingWeeks = 52 − weeksOff

annualBillable = safeBillable × workingWeeks

monthlyBillable = annualBillable ÷ 12

utilisation = annualBillable ÷ (workingHours × workingWeeks)

The buffer is applied last, and it is not another category of work. It is the acknowledgement that every number above it is an estimate — that some weeks a client goes quiet, a handover takes three times as long, or a bug eats a Thursday. A schedule with no slack turns each of those into an evening.

A worked example

Starting from

Working hours: 40h/week
Admin: 4h
Sales: 4h
Internal meetings: 2h
Learning: 2h
Capacity buffer: 10%
Weeks off: 6

1
Non-billable
4 + 4 + 2 + 2 = 12h
2
Client hours
40 − 12 = 28h
3
After the buffer
28 × 0.90 = 25.2h a week
4
Working weeks
52 − 6 = 46
5
Billable a year
25.2 × 46 = 1,159h
6
Utilisation
1,159 ÷ (40 × 46) = 63%

25.2 billable hours a week — 63% of the time worked. At $100 an hour that caps the year at about $116,000, before a single quiet week.

Common mistakes

Counting a 40-hour week as 40 billable hours

The single most expensive assumption in freelancing. It inflates your revenue forecast by roughly 60% and makes your rate look higher than it is.

Forgetting the work that wins work

Proposals, discovery calls and the projects you do not win are real hours. They are also the hours that keep you in business, so they belong in the calculation rather than being treated as a failure of discipline.

Pushing utilisation above 80%

It is possible for a month. Over a year it means sales have stopped, which is what produces the gap three months later.

Ignoring the buffer

A zero buffer says every estimate above is exact. Nobody’s are.

When to recalculate

Once a quarter, and whenever your working pattern changes. If you have tracked time for a few months, replace the estimates above with what actually happened — the answer is usually a few hours lower, and knowing that is worth more than the estimate was.

Where Freshlance fits

Every number on this page is a guess until something measures it. Freshlance tracks time against real projects and clients, so admin, meetings and delivery separate out on their own, and it feeds the same hours into your capacity so the week you have left is a calculated number rather than a feeling.

Questions

What is a good utilisation rate for a freelancer?

Most sustainable solo practices land between 55% and 70% of working time on billable work. Agencies target similar numbers for their delivery staff, and they have people whose whole job is the sales and admin a freelancer does alone. Consistently above 80% usually means business development has stopped.

Should I count time spent on proposals?

Yes, as non-billable. It is real time that produces no invoice, and it belongs in the sales line above. Pricing as though it did not happen is how the rate ends up too low.

How do I reduce non-billable hours?

The two that move most are admin and repeated client communication. Recurring invoices, a client portal that answers "how is it going" without an email, and templates for proposals and onboarding typically give back several hours a week. Sales time is harder to cut and usually should not be.

Does a capacity buffer mean I am working less?

No — it means you are selling less than the absolute maximum. The hours still get worked; they just go to the overrun, the urgent fix and the week that went sideways, rather than being promised to a client in advance.

How does this relate to my hourly rate?

Directly. The annual billable hours here is the denominator in the rate calculation: your income target and overheads divided by these hours. Fewer billable hours means a higher rate for the same income, which is why the two calculators should agree.

Note. The results reflect the estimates you enter. Tracked time is the only way to find out how close those estimates are.

Take the answer into a document

The calculator gives you the number. These are the free, editable files that put it in front of a client — no signup, Microsoft and OpenDocument formats.

Freelance Timesheet Template

Available formats: XLSXODSCSVPDF

A working timesheet: start and end times, breaks, billable flags and rates, with totals by client, project, week and month.