Freelance Rate Calculator
Work backwards from what you need to earn. Add your target take-home pay to your business expenses, divide by one minus your tax rate to get the revenue you must bill, then divide by the billable hours you will actually sell. The defaults here — 100,000 income, 33,000 expenses, 25% tax, 30 billable hours over 48 weeks — need 177,333 of revenue and give an hourly rate of $124.
Not total work hours
Annual Business Expenses
Rate Breakdown
Time Breakdown
Rate Comparison
| Rate Type | Hourly | Daily | Monthly | Annual |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum Rate | $ | $ | $ | $ |
| Recommended Rate | $ | $ | $ | $ |
| Premium Rate | $ | $ | $ | $ |
About Freelance Rate Calculator
The Income goal tab is the one that does real arithmetic. Enter your desired annual income, the billable hours you expect to sell each week, the weeks you will take off and your tax rate, then four expense fields: health insurance, retirement savings, software and tools, and other. The calculator adds income and expenses, divides by one minus the tax rate to find the gross revenue you have to bill, works out how many billable hours a year that leaves, and divides.
With the values it opens on, that chain is visible in the two breakdown panels: 100,000 take-home plus 33,000 of expenses is 133,000, which at a 25% tax rate needs 177,333 of gross revenue; 52 weeks minus 4 off gives 48 weeks and 1,440 billable hours; 177,333 over 1,440 rounds up to $124 an hour. From there it prints $992 a day at eight hours, $3,720 a week at your 30 hours, $16,108 a month and a suggested range of $93 to $186.
The Market rate tab is a different thing and you should treat it differently. It multiplies a starting figure for your industry by factors for experience, location and project complexity. Those numbers are the tool's own assumptions, not survey data, so use that tab as a sanity check against the rate your own costs demand, never as evidence of what your market pays.
Limits. The hours you enter are billable hours, not hours worked: admin, sales and unpaid revisions are not billable, and the field says so. The tax rate is a single blended percentage, so it cannot model brackets, self-employment tax and local rules separately. Nothing here is tax or financial advice, and none of your figures leave your browser.
Use Cases
How to use
Stay on the Income goal tab and enter your desired annual income — the amount you want to keep after tax and expenses.
Set the billable hours you can really sell each week and the weeks off you plan to take; 52 minus the weeks off gives the weeks you will work.
Enter a single blended tax rate as a percentage, below 100.
Fill the four annual expense fields: health insurance, retirement savings, software and tools, and other business costs.
Read the recommended hourly rate and the per day, per week, per month and annual tiles beside it.
Open the rate breakdown and time breakdown panels to see the gross revenue needed and the total billable hours behind that rate, and use the Market rate tab only as a cross-check.
Pro Tips
- Billable hours are not working hours. Thirty billable hours usually means a full week once admin, pitching and unpaid revisions are counted, and the note under the field says exactly that.
- Put the benefits an employer used to pay into the expense fields. Health insurance and retirement savings are what make a freelance rate look high next to a salary, and leaving them out understates the rate badly.
- The hourly figure is rounded up, never down. A calculation of 123.15 becomes $124, so the day, week and month tiles are all built on the rounded-up number rather than the raw one.
- The suggested range is arithmetic, not research: it is simply 75% and 150% of your calculated rate. Treat the bottom of it as the point below which the income goal stops working.
- The tax rate field is one blended percentage. If you pay income tax and self-employment tax separately, add them together before typing, and keep the field below 100 or the calculation is refused.
Troubleshooting
The calculator shows an error instead of a rate.
One of the four inputs is outside its allowed range. Income and billable hours must both be above zero, weeks off has to be between 0 and 51, and the tax rate has to be below 100. Correct the offending field and the rate reappears immediately.
The rate looks far too high compared with what people say they charge.
Check the billable hours first: 30 a week over 48 weeks is only 1,440 hours a year to carry the whole target. Then check the expense fields, since health insurance and retirement savings alone are 26,000 in the defaults. Lowering the target income or raising billable hours brings the rate down.
The Market rate tab and the Income goal tab disagree.
They are answering different questions. Income goal computes what your own costs require; Market rate multiplies a starting figure by assumptions about experience, location and complexity, and those assumptions are this tool's, not survey data. When they diverge, the income figure is the one grounded in your numbers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Add the income you want to keep to your annual business expenses, divide by one minus your tax rate to get the revenue you must bill, then divide that by your billable hours for the year. With the defaults here — 100,000 plus 33,000 expenses at 25% tax over 1,440 billable hours — that is 177,333 of revenue and $124 an hour.
Enough that your billable hours cover your income, your expenses and your tax. The number depends on your own costs, not on an average: the same 100,000 target needs $124 an hour at 30 billable hours a week and considerably more at 20. Enter your figures on the Income goal tab rather than copying someone else's rate.
This calculator multiplies the hourly figure by eight, so the $124 hourly rate in the defaults becomes $992 a day. If your working day is shorter, or a day for a client also swallows travel and admin, do the multiplication yourself from the hourly figure rather than using the tile.
Put your old take-home salary into desired income, then add everything the employer used to pay on your behalf into the expense fields — health insurance, retirement contributions, software licences. Set realistic billable hours and weeks off, because paid holiday disappears too. The rate that comes out is what replaces the package, not just the salary.
Billable hours are the hours a client actually pays for, which is always fewer than the hours you work: pitching, invoicing, email and unpaid revisions are not billable. The field opens on 30 a week, which already implies a full working week. If you are honest and it is closer to 20, use 20 and let the rate rise.
Yes, and this calculator does it by grossing up. It divides income plus expenses by one minus your tax rate, so a 25% rate turns a 133,000 requirement into 177,333 of revenue. Use a single blended percentage covering everything you owe, and treat the result as an estimate rather than tax advice.
There is no number this page can honestly give you, because it depends on your market and your costs. What it can do is show the floor: enter the income you need to live on, your real expenses and the hours you can genuinely bill, and anything below the resulting rate loses money. The Market rate tab's junior multiplier is an assumption, not evidence.
They are the tool's own starting figures and multipliers, not a rate survey. An industry base is multiplied by a factor for experience, one for location and one for project complexity. Use the tab to see how those levers move a rate relative to each other, and rely on the Income goal tab for anything you will actually quote.
The arithmetic says yes, because a freelance rate has to cover things a salary does not. In the defaults, 33,000 of expenses and 25% tax turn a 100,000 target into 177,333 of billing across only 1,440 billable hours. That gap is unpaid time, benefits and tax, not profit.
Start from the desired annual income field: that is the take-home figure the rate is built to deliver, after tax and after the business expenses you listed. What you actually draw each month is a business decision this tool does not model, and it says nothing about retained earnings, company structure or tax treatment.