About The Online Works

Our purpose

Pricing is one of the hardest parts of working independently, and it is usually the part nobody teaches you. Most people arrive at a rate by copying a figure they saw in a forum, matching what a competitor advertises, or converting an old salary into an hourly number. Each of those methods leaves something out, and what gets left out tends to be the cost of running the business.

A freelance rate calculator helps because it makes the arithmetic visible. When you can see how unpaid admin, software costs, tax, platform fees, and time off all sit behind a single hourly figure, pricing stops being a guess and becomes a decision. That is useful whether you are setting a rate for the first time, deciding whether to raise an existing one, or checking that a fixed project fee still makes sense.

We built this tool because the calculation itself is not complicated, but doing it by hand in a spreadsheet is tedious enough that most people skip it. It should take a minute, not an afternoon.

What we provide

The Freelance Rate Calculator works backwards from what you want to earn. You enter your details, and it estimates the hourly rate and daily rate your work needs to reach that target once costs and unpaid time are accounted for. It also shows the full breakdown, so you can see exactly where each part of the number comes from.

The factors it takes into account:

• Income goals. What you want to keep after tax and business costs, rather than what you invoice.
• Working hours. The hours you spend on your business each day, including everything that is not client work.
• Billable hours. The hours a client actually pays for, which are almost always fewer than your working hours.
• Expenses. Software, hardware, insurance, accounting, workspace, and other recurring costs of operating.
• Taxes. The rate you expect to pay on your profit, so your take-home target survives the tax bill.
• Platform and payment fees. Marketplace commissions, processing charges, and transfer or conversion costs taken out of the invoice.
• Time off. Holidays and planned unpaid days, which reduce the hours available to bill across the year.

Everything can be changed. Adjusting one input at a time is often the most useful part of the tool, because it shows which factor moves your rate the most.

Who is it for?

Anyone who bills for their own time or their own work, in any field. The calculation is the same whether you invoice by the hour, by the day, or by the project.

It is equally useful at either end of a career. If you are just starting out, it gives you a defensible starting point instead of a number chosen out of nervousness. If you have been working independently for years, it is a quick way to check whether your current rate still covers rising costs and the way your time is actually spent now.

Our approach

This is a single-tool website, and that is deliberate. Doing one thing means we can keep it focused rather than cluttered.

We would rather the calculator be clear than clever. If a result is confusing, or an explanation could be better, we want to know, and the contact page is there for exactly that.

Important note