💰 Freelance Rate Calculator

Enter your target yearly take-home, expected billable hours and yearly business expenses to find the hourly rate you actually need to charge.

Target Yearly Income ($)

Yearly Business Expenses ($)

Working Weeks per Year

Billable Hours per Week

Working the rate out backwards

The tool starts from what you need to earn and divides it by the hours you can actually sell:

billable hours = working weeks × billable hours per week
revenue needed = target income + business expenses
hourly rate    = revenue needed / billable hours

The defaults - $80,000 target, $8,000 expenses, 46 weeks, 25 billable hours - give 1,150 billable hours against $88,000 of revenue, so the rate is $76.52 an hour. The page also shows $612.17 for an eight-hour day and $1,913.04 as the weekly target.

The two inputs that decide everything

Working weeks. The default 46 leaves six weeks for holiday, illness and gaps between contracts. Putting 52 here quietly assumes you never take a day off, and drops the rate to $67.69.
Billable hours per week. Twenty-five of a 40-hour week is about right once pitching, invoicing, admin and email are taken out. Freelancers who plan on 40 end up charging a third too little.
Expenses means the business side: software, insurance, accountant, equipment, coworking. Add health cover and pension contributions here if you fund them yourself.

Tax is not in this figure, as the note under the result says. Target income is treated as revenue you keep before tax, so if you want $80,000 in your pocket at a 30% combined income and self-employment rate, you need about $114,300 before tax - roughly $106 an hour on the same 1,150 hours, not $76.52.

Frequently asked questions

How many hours a week can a freelancer really bill?

Most sustain 50% to 70% of a working week, so 20 to 28 hours. The rest goes on finding the next job, quoting, invoicing and the work nobody pays for. Bill 30 or more consistently and you are usually short of holiday, not efficient.

Does this rate include tax?

No. Whatever you put in the target income box is what you want the business to produce for you before tax is taken. Divide your target by one minus your expected tax rate before entering it if you want a take-home figure.

How do I turn an hourly rate into a day rate?

The page multiplies by eight, which is the honest arithmetic but an optimistic day. Few people deliver eight focused hours in a row, so many freelancers price a day at six or seven billable hours and charge accordingly.