Freelance Rate Calculator
Calculate the hourly and daily freelance rate you need to reach your income goals while accounting for working hours, expenses, taxes, and non-billable time.
Free to use, no sign-up, and nothing you enter is stored.
Quick rate estimate
Updates as you typeAssumes 25 percent tax and 5 percent platform fees, in the currency you enter, with no time off deducted. Adjust every figure in the full calculator.
What the Freelance Rate Calculator does
Most freelancers pick a number by copying what others charge. This calculator works backwards instead: it starts from the income you want to earn, subtracts the costs of running your business, and divides what is left by the hours you can realistically bill.
You enter a few details about how you work and how much you need to earn. The freelancer rate calculator then estimates the hourly rate and daily rate required to hit that target. The inputs it uses are:
The result is an estimate, not a quote. It gives you a floor to price above, so you can see straight away whether the rate you have in mind actually supports the income you are aiming for.
Why use a freelance rate calculator
Pricing gets easier when the numbers behind it are visible. Here is what the calculator helps you work out.
Set a realistic hourly rate
Start from your income target and working pattern instead of guessing, or matching a rate you saw in a forum thread.
Account for business expenses
Software, hardware, insurance, accounting, and subscriptions come out of your rate. Include them so they are not quietly absorbed.
Understand the value of billable hours
See how admin, pitching, and unpaid revisions reduce the hours you can invoice, and what that does to the rate you need.
Plan around income goals
Test a monthly or yearly target and check whether your current schedule can support it before you commit to it.
Estimate daily project rates
Get a day rate alongside the hourly figure, which is useful for retainers, workshops, and fixed-scope project quotes.
Make pricing decisions with clearer numbers
Know what a discount actually costs you, and where your rate sits relative to the minimum your business needs.
How it works
Three steps, and it takes about a minute if you already know roughly what you spend and how you work.
Enter your work and income details
Add the income you want to earn, the hours you plan to work, your expected time off, business costs, tax rate, and any platform fees.
Calculate your required rate
The calculator removes non-billable time and costs from the equation and works out what each billable hour has to earn.
Review your hourly and daily rate
Compare the result with what you charge now, then adjust the inputs to see how more billable hours or lower costs change the number.
Find Out What You Should Charge
Enter your income goal and working hours, and see the hourly and daily rate your freelance work needs to cover.
What is a freelance rate?
Your freelance rate is the price you charge a client for your time or for a defined piece of work. It is usually expressed as an hourly rate, a daily rate, or a fixed project fee, and all three are connected: a project fee is normally a day or hourly rate multiplied by the time the work is expected to take.
The important difference between a freelance rate and a salary is what the number has to cover. An employee’s hourly wage sits on top of paid leave, employer tax contributions, equipment, software, and sick days that someone else pays for. A freelance rate has to fund all of that from the same figure, plus the hours you spend running the business rather than doing client work. That is why converting a salary into an hourly figure and charging it almost always leaves a freelancer short.
Why your hourly rate matters
Even if you quote fixed prices and never show an hourly figure to a client, you still need to know it. Your hourly rate is the measuring stick you use to judge every piece of work: whether a project fee is fair, whether a retainer is worth keeping, and whether a long-running client has quietly become unprofitable.
It also tells you the cost of your own decisions. If you know your rate, you know what an extra round of unpaid revisions costs, what a discount really gives away, and how many hours you would have to add to your week to reach a bigger income goal. Without it, pricing becomes a feeling, and it tends to settle wherever the client is comfortable rather than where your business needs it.
Billable hours vs working hours
Working hours are all the hours you spend on your business. Billable hours are only the ones a client pays for. The gap between the two is the single most common reason a freelance rate turns out to be too low.
A typical week includes plenty of work nobody invoices:
- Finding clients, writing proposals, and answering enquiries that go nowhere
- Emails, calls, scheduling, and project admin
- Invoicing, chasing late payments, and bookkeeping
- Learning, portfolio updates, and marketing your own services
- Scope creep and revisions beyond what was quoted
Many freelancers find that somewhere between half and three quarters of their working hours are billable, and the ratio shifts depending on the type of work and how established they are. If you work 40 hours and bill 24 of them, every billable hour has to carry the cost of the 16 that were not. Entering an honest billable figure, rather than a hopeful one, is what makes the calculated rate usable.
How expenses affect your freelance rate
Business expenses come out of your revenue before anything reaches you. A freelancer earning the same total as a salaried worker takes home less, because the tools, cover, and downtime are self-funded.
The costs worth counting usually include:
- Software subscriptions, hosting, and any licences you rely on
- Hardware, replaced or repaired on your own budget
- Accounting, legal help, insurance, and professional memberships
- Workspace costs, whether that is a desk at home or a rented space
- Income tax and self-employment or social contributions
- Platform commissions, payment processing, and currency conversion fees
- Unpaid time off: holidays, sick days, and quiet months between projects
Percentage-based costs deserve particular attention. A platform commission and a payment processing fee are taken from the invoice total, so they reduce every payment you receive rather than showing up as a bill at the end of the month. Adding them to the calculator, along with your expected tax rate, keeps the resulting rate closer to what you would actually keep.
Frequently asked questions
It is a tool that estimates the hourly and daily rate you need to charge to reach a chosen income, once your working hours, billable hours, expenses, taxes, fees, and time off are taken into account. It replaces guesswork with a calculation you can adjust and re-run.
Add your income goal to your yearly business expenses, allow for tax and any platform fees, then divide the total by the number of hours you can realistically bill in a year. The freelance hourly rate calculator does this for you, including the adjustment for holidays and non-billable time.
A billable hour is any hour a client pays for, directly through an hourly rate or indirectly through a project fee or retainer. Time spent on proposals, admin, invoicing, marketing, and learning is part of your working week but is not billable.
There is no single correct figure, and it varies by field and by how established you are. The practical approach is to track your own weeks for a month and use the real ratio. If you have no data yet, start with a conservative estimate and update the calculation once you know how your time is actually spent.
Yes. Tax is paid out of what you invoice, so a rate set without it will not leave the take-home income you expected. Use the rate that applies where you live and file, and treat the result as an estimate rather than tax advice. An accountant can confirm the right figure for your situation.
A day rate is the hourly rate multiplied by the number of billable hours in a working day, commonly six to eight. Because a full booked day usually means less switching between clients and less unpaid admin, some freelancers set the day rate slightly below the strict hourly multiple, and price a half day as a little more than half.
They do, because they are deducted from the invoice rather than billed separately. A marketplace commission, a processing charge, and a currency conversion spread all reduce what reaches your account, so the rate needs to be set high enough to absorb them.
Treat it as a minimum rather than a final price. The result shows what your work needs to earn to meet your target. Experience, demand, the value of the outcome to the client, and rates in your market can all justify charging more. What it is useful for is spotting when a quote falls below the level your business can sustain.
Ready to calculate your freelance rate?
Put in your numbers and see the hourly and daily rate your income goal actually requires.
The Online Works provides general information and estimates. It is not financial, tax, or legal advice.