Free tool for freelancers

Freelance hourly rate calculator

Start from the pay you want to take home in a year. Add the tax you set aside and what the business costs to run, then divide by the hours you can actually bill: the weeks you work, times the client hours in each one, not all 2,080 hours of a 40-hour year. Every number below is a starting assumption: replace it with yours and the rate updates as you type.

Your year

Every field is a whole number. Business costs are what you pay to work for a year: software, equipment, insurance, an accountant, health cover you buy yourself. Billable hours are hours a client pays for, not the admin, sales and email around them.

The money
The time

Your hourly rate

—

Over — billable hours a year

Take-home pay
—
Tax set aside
—
Business costs
—
To bill in a year
—

A billable week at this rate: —

Priced over all 2,080 hours of a 40-hour year instead: —

The math runs in your browser. Only opening the draft sends the sentence below to FyneSite.

Next: your own website

Open a free draft of your freelance website.

FyneSite builds a draft site from one sentence about you. Add your name, what you do and your town, and the sentence below is written from them and your hourly rate. Change anything you like, then open the draft; changing a number above rewrites it. No account needed to look.

Ines Carver, a demo freelance designer website built on FyneSite
Ines Carver is a demo freelance site built on FyneSite, not a real person. Yours starts from your own name, work, town and rate.

How the rate is worked out

  1. Tax set aside. Tax is a share of profit, so take-home pay is what is left after it. The set-aside is take-home pay times your percentage, divided by what remains (25% of profit on $60,000 take-home is $20,000), rounded up to the next whole dollar.
  2. To bill in a year. Take-home pay plus the tax set-aside plus business costs.
  3. Billable hours. Billable hours a week times the weeks you work: 52 minus your weeks off.
  4. Hourly rate. The yearly total divided by billable hours, rounded up to the next whole dollar, so the rate never falls short of the pay you asked for.
  5. Over 2,080 hours. The same yearly total divided by 40 hours times 52 weeks, rounded up the same way. If that rate is lower than yours, billing it for your real hours leaves the shortfall shown.

This is planning arithmetic, not tax advice: your real tax depends on where you live and how the business is set up. Websites for freelancers

Drafting your site

From what you wrote:

Reading what you wrote