Calculate your ideal freelance hourly or project rate based on desired salary, expenses, taxes, billable hours, and profit margin.
A freelance rate must recover more than the time spent completing client work. This calculator combines a desired salary with business expenses, a tax allowance, available billable hours, and a profit margin to estimate an hourly or project rate. The result is a planning target for pricing work, not a prediction of what clients will accept. The most common mistake is entering every working hour as billable, even though prospecting, administration, professional development, leave, and gaps between contracts do not generate client revenue.
Desired salary represents the personal compensation the freelance business needs to support. Expenses add costs such as software, insurance, equipment, accounting, and workspace. The tax and profit entries add further revenue requirements. Together, these inputs describe how much client income the rate must recover rather than merely converting an employee salary into an hourly wage.
The calculator relates the revenue requirement to the billable time available for earning it. Reducing billable hours raises the required hourly rate when the financial targets remain unchanged. Project pricing also depends on the amount of billable effort assigned to the job, so an accurate time estimate is essential when using the result to prepare a fixed-price quote.
No. Enter the hours you reasonably expect to invoice to clients, not total time at work. Administrative tasks, marketing, proposal writing, training, holidays, sick days, and idle periods should be excluded. Overstating billable capacity spreads the revenue target across hours that cannot earn revenue and can make the suggested rate too low.
Yes, as a starting point, if the project's billable effort is estimated carefully. A fixed quote may also need allowances for revisions, meetings, communication, third-party costs, schedule risk, and scope uncertainty. The answer is no if the project hours are unknown and the quote provides no protection against additional work.
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