Freelance Capacity Calculator

It builds a day-by-day schedule of the next twelve months from your working pattern, your time off, your retainers and your live projects — then finds the earliest date a new project could actually start, and when it would finish.

This is not available = total − booked. That subtraction tells you how many spare hours exist somewhere in the next year, which is not the same question as whether a specific job fits before a specific date.

Capacity is reduced in a fixed order, each layer taking from what the one above it left.

Why retainers are reserved before they are worked

A retainer is capacity somebody has already bought. Treating a quiet retainer month as free time is how a freelancer ends up with a retainer client and a project client both expecting the same Tuesday.

Why deadlines decide the order

Work is scheduled earliest-deadline-first, because that is the order it actually has to be done in. Work with no deadline goes behind work with one, unless you mark it high priority.

What happens when something does not fit

It is reported, not hidden. If a project cannot be finished before its deadline, the result says so and says how many hours are missing. A scheduler that quietly pushes impossible work past its deadline and calls the plan successful is worse than no scheduler.

Quoting a start date from a calendar

A calendar shows meetings, not workload. The reason the next available date is hard is that it lives in the hours left on active projects, and those do not appear anywhere in a calendar.

Treating a full working day as available capacity

Eight hours at a desk is not eight hours of client delivery. Admin, sales and the buffer come out first — which is what the layers above do.

Counting unused retainer hours as free

They are sold. They are just not spent yet.

Ignoring the weeks after the first one

A project that fits this week may still be impossible, because next week is where it would actually have to be done. The timeline above is for exactly this.

Every time you are asked when you can start — which, for most freelancers, is several times a month. That is precisely the problem with doing it here: this page is a point-in-time estimate, accurate the moment you fill it in and stale as soon as an hour is logged or a deadline moves.

This is the calculation Freshlance is built around. The product runs the same scheduling logic continuously against your real data: hours are tracked, so remaining work falls on its own; retainers burn down; deadlines move; new work is added. Your next available date is derived on every render rather than stored, so it cannot be stale.

Clients can then book from it directly — your booking page offers start dates that come from the capacity engine, not a static grid of slots.

Further reading

The most expensive question in freelancing is about this calculation and why guessing at it costs either weekends or work.