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Freelance Rate Calculator

Calculate the hourly rate you need to cover your income target, business costs and non-billable time without assuming every working hour is billable.

Your numbers

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

What you need to earn

Currency

Changes how results are displayed. No conversion is applied.

Desired annual take-home income

What you want left for yourself over a year, after business costs.

Annual business expenses

Software, equipment, accounting, insurance, workspace, subcontractors. A rough total is fine.

Tax and reserve percentage

This is only a budgeting reserve. Freshlance is not calculating your actual tax liability.

The time you actually have

This is where a rate calculation usually goes wrong. The hours you work and the hours you can sell are different numbers.

Working hours per week

Everything you spend on the business, billable or not.

Non-billable hours per week

Sales, proposals, admin, invoicing, marketing, internal meetings. For most freelancers this is 8–15 hours.

Weeks off per year

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

Safety buffer

Room for downtime and under-utilisation. 10–15% is a common starting point.

Recommended freelance rate

$104.76/hr

To reach your income goal on this schedule you need roughly 28h of billable work a week at this rate.

Minimum sustainable rate: $95.24/hr
Billable hours per week: 28h
Annual revenue target: $134,933
Monthly revenue target: $11,244

Billable hours per year46 working weeks1,288h

Non-billable share of your week30%

Revenue before the safety buffer$122,667

Set aside for tax and reserveA budgeting assumption, not a tax calculation$33,733

Note: This is the rate your own financial target requires. It does not tell you what the market will pay — if it lands far above what clients in your field accept, the answer is usually fewer non-billable hours or a different kind of work, not a smaller income.

What this calculator does

It answers one question: at your income target, your costs and your real schedule, what does an hour of client work have to be worth?

Forty working hours does not mean forty billable hours. Sales, proposals, invoicing, project admin and internal meetings all come out of the same week, and none of them appear on an invoice. A rate worked out by dividing a salary by 2,080 hours is short by a third before anyone has taken a day off.

How the calculation works

workingWeeks = 52 − weeksOff

clientHoursPerWeek = max(0, workingHours − nonBillableHours)

annualBillableHours = workingWeeks × clientHoursPerWeek

baseRevenue = (takeHome + expenses) ÷ (1 − taxReserve)

minimumRate = baseRevenue ÷ annualBillableHours

bufferedRevenue = baseRevenue × (1 + safetyBuffer)

recommendedRate = bufferedRevenue ÷ annualBillableHours

Why the tax reserve divides

To keep $80,000 after setting a quarter of your revenue aside, you have to earn that amount divided by 0.75 — not multiplied by 1.25. Multiplying under-shoots by about 7%, which is a month of income at the end of the year.

Why there are two rates

The minimum is the break-even against your own target: hit it exactly, every week, all year, and you land on your number with nothing to spare. The recommended rate adds the buffer, which is what covers the fortnight between projects and the client who pays late.

A worked example

Starting from

Take-home target: $80,000
Business expenses: $12,000
Tax reserve: 25%
Working hours: 40h/week
Non-billable hours: 12h/week
Weeks off: 6
Safety buffer: 10%

1
Working weeks
52 − 6 = 46 weeks
2
Billable hours a week
40 − 12 = 28h
3
Billable hours a year
46 × 28 = 1,288h
4
Revenue needed
(80,000 + 12,000) ÷ 0.75 = $122,667
5
Minimum rate
122,667 ÷ 1,288 = $95.24/hr
6
With a 10% buffer
122,667 × 1.10 ÷ 1,288 = $104.76/hr

$104.76 an hour, for 28 billable hours a week — not the $44 an hour that dividing $92,000 by a 2,080-hour year suggests.

Common mistakes

Treating every working hour as billable

This is the big one, and it is worth about a third of the rate. If you are not sure what your non-billable load is, the Billable Hours Calculator splits it out category by category.

Forgetting the unpaid weeks

Holiday, illness and the gap between engagements are all weeks where nothing is invoiced. Six weeks off is not generous; it is two weeks of holiday, public holidays, a week of illness and two quiet weeks that happen to every freelancer.

Pricing from a former salary

An employer paid your payroll taxes, your equipment, your software, your holiday and the weeks you were between projects. A freelance rate has to cover all of it, which is why the same take-home needs a much larger headline number.

Confusing this with a market rate

This calculator knows what you need. It does not know what your clients will pay. If the two are far apart, that gap is the actual problem, and no amount of recalculating closes it.

When to recalculate

Once a year as a matter of course, and whenever one of the inputs genuinely moves: your costs change, you take on a subcontractor, you drop to four days a week, or you notice that your non-billable load has crept from eight hours to fifteen. Those are the changes that quietly make a correct rate wrong.

Where Freshlance fits

This page is a snapshot. The two inputs that decide the answer — how many hours you actually bill and how much of your week disappears into everything else — are the two you cannot know without tracking them. Freshlance time tracking records both against real projects, so next year’s recalculation starts from what happened rather than from what you assumed.

Questions

How many freelance hours are actually billable?

For most established solo freelancers, 24–30 of a 40-hour week. Below 20 usually means sales and admin have taken over; above 32 sustained usually means the non-billable work is happening in the evening rather than not happening.

Should business expenses be included in my rate?

Yes. Software, hardware, insurance, accounting and workspace are the cost of being able to do the work at all, and if the rate does not cover them they come out of your take-home. Costs billed directly to a specific client — a stock photo licence, a paid plugin for their site — belong on that project instead, not in the rate.

Should freelancers charge for admin time?

Not as a line item, usually. Clients push back on being invoiced for your invoicing. Cover it in the rate instead: that is exactly what the non-billable hours input above does — it raises the rate on the hours you do bill so the hours you cannot bill are still paid for.

Is this a market-rate calculator?

No. It calculates what your own target requires, which is a different question from what clients in your field will pay. Use it to find the floor you cannot go below, then check that floor against what you know about your market.

What tax percentage should I use?

Whatever your accountant tells you, and nothing here is a substitute for asking them. Many freelancers reserve somewhere between 25% and 35% to cover income tax plus self-employment or social contributions, but the right figure depends on your country, your structure and your income.

Does this work for day rates and fixed prices?

Yes, as the input to both. Multiply the hourly figure by the hours in your working day for a day rate, and use it as the hourly value in the Project Pricing Calculator for fixed-fee work.

Note. This is a planning tool, not financial or tax advice. The tax reserve is a budgeting assumption you supply, not a calculation of what you owe.

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 Invoice Template

Available formats: DOCXODTXLSXODSPDF

A complete client invoice for hourly, fixed-price or milestone work, with line items, tax, expenses and payment details.