Hourly Rate Calculator
Find the freelance rate that hits your income goal.
How to use
- 1 Enter the annual income you want to take home.
- 2 Add yearly business expenses, working hours, weeks and unpaid time off.
- 3 Set what percentage of hours are truly billable and your profit margin.
- 4 Read your required hourly rate, plus day and weekly equivalents.
About Hourly Rate Calculator
The Hourly Rate Calculator turns your real income goal into the rate you actually need to charge per billable hour.
New freelancers and contractors often pick a number out of the air, then discover that unpaid holidays, admin time, business expenses and lumpy utilisation leave them earning far less than a salaried role.
This calculator works backwards from the take-home figure you want and bakes in the factors a naive "salary divided by 2080" estimate ignores.
You enter your target annual income, your yearly business expenses, your typical working hours and weeks, the unpaid weeks you take off, the percentage of worked hours that are genuinely billable (after sales calls, email and downtime), and the profit margin you want on top of costs.
The tool computes your true billable hours for the year, grosses up income plus expenses by your margin to find the revenue you must bring in, and divides one by the other to give a defensible hourly rate.
It also shows an equivalent day rate, weekly billings and the annual revenue target so you can sanity-check a quote at a glance.
All maths happens locally in your browser — nothing is sent anywhere — so you can model different scenarios privately and the tool keeps working offline once loaded.
FAQ
Why is the rate higher than my salary divided by 2080?
Because not every worked hour is billable and you also need to cover unpaid time off, business expenses and profit. Spreading the same income across fewer billable hours raises the rate.
What should I use for the billable percentage?
Many independents bill 60–75% of their time after sales, admin and downtime. Track a few weeks to find your real figure; a lower percentage means a higher required rate.
Does this include taxes?
No. Treat the target income as the pre-tax revenue you want from billing. Add a tax buffer to your target, or model it inside the profit margin, to keep the rate simple.