A freelance rate calculator that works backwards from the life you need to fund. Most freelancers set a rate by halving a salary and dividing by 2,080 hours — which ignores tax, unpaid admin, holidays and the months with no work. This tool counts the hours you can genuinely bill and tells you what each one has to be worth.
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Freelance Rate CalculatorLive
This tool is built for a wider screen — scroll sideways inside the frame, or turn your device.
How to use it
Four steps to a result
Set your target income
The amount you need to take home after tax, not a headline salary figure. Start from what your life actually costs.
Add your business expenses
Software, hardware, insurance, accountant, coworking, training, pension. These come out before you pay yourself and they add up faster than expected.
Count your real billable hours
Subtract holidays, sick days, public holidays and the unpaid time spent on admin, pitching and invoicing. A realistic figure is around 1,000 to 1,200 billable hours a year, not 2,080.
Read your minimum rate
The result is your floor, not your price. Quote above it — the floor assumes everything goes to plan, and it rarely does.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
Add your target take-home income, your business expenses and your tax liability to get the total revenue you need. Divide that by the hours you can realistically bill in a year. The second number is where most people go wrong.
Far fewer than a salaried year's 2,080. After holidays, sick days, public holidays and the unpaid work of finding clients, invoicing, and admin, most sustainable freelancers bill 1,000 to 1,200 hours. Planning on 1,800 is how people end up working every weekend and still missing the number.
Because you are also paying for everything an employer used to cover: both halves of payroll tax, your pension, health insurance, paid holiday, sick leave, equipment, software and the gaps between contracts. A rate that merely matches an hourly salary equivalent is a substantial pay cut.
Hourly is the honest starting point and the right way to calculate your floor. Once you can estimate a type of work reliably, fixed fees are better for both sides: the client gets certainty, and you stop being penalised for getting faster at your job.
Review annually at minimum, and raise for new clients first — that is the low-risk experiment. If you are booked solid and turning work away, your rate is too low. If nobody ever hesitates at your quote, it is definitely too low.
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