Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator

How to use

1. 1Pick a preset that is close to your situation (Starter, Full-time, Consultant, or Agency of one), or start from Custom.
2. 2Set the desired take-home pay for the year. This is the net amount you want in your pocket after taxes.
3. 3Enter your weekly hours and how many weeks you plan to take off for vacation, sickness, and public holidays.
4. 4Add the non-billable hours per week you spend on admin, sales, marketing, and learning. Honest numbers here matter more than optimistic ones.
5. 5Enter your annual business overhead (software subscriptions, insurance, accountant, coworking, hardware) and an effective tax rate on gross revenue.
6. 6Set a profit margin buffer (often 10 to 25 percent) to cover slow months and reinvestment, or leave it at zero for a pure break-even rate.
7. 7Read the Target hourly rate at the top: this is what you need to charge clients. The Minimum hourly rate is the break-even figure without the profit margin.
8. 8Use the project rate reference (half day, full day, week, month) to anchor fixed-price quotes and retainers, and click Copy summary to save the full plan.

About this tool

Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator solves the question every freelancer, consultant, and independent contractor faces when starting out or repricing: what do I actually need to charge per hour to live the life I am planning. A simple salary divided by 2,000 hours is almost always too low, because a self-employed person also has to absorb business overhead, self-employment and income taxes, unpaid vacation and sick time, public holidays, and a long tail of non-billable hours spent on admin, sales calls, proposals, marketing, learning, and tool maintenance. This calculator wires all of those numbers into a single in-browser model. You enter the net take-home income you want for the year, the hours per week you can sustainably work, the weeks you plan to take off (vacation, sick buffer, public holidays), the non-billable hours each week you spend on running the business, your annual business overhead (software, insurance, accounting, hardware, coworking, training), an effective tax rate on gross revenue, and an optional profit margin buffer. The tool computes your real billable hours per year, grosses your costs up so that revenue minus tax actually leaves the take-home you wanted, then divides by billable hours to produce a target hourly rate and a minimum (break-even) hourly rate without the profit margin. Useful for designers, developers, writers, marketers, photographers, coaches, accountants, virtual assistants, and any independent practitioner who needs a defensible answer when a client asks the rate question. Four presets (Starter freelancer, Full-time freelancer, Senior consultant, Agency of one) give you a sensible starting point, and an eight-currency selector formats every money value through Intl.NumberFormat without applying any FX conversion. Results include a full annual revenue plan (take-home, overhead, taxes, profit buffer), a capacity panel with utilization percentage, and ready-to-quote half-day, full-day, weekly, and monthly project rates. A Copy summary button gives you a clean text block to paste into a proposal, a rate card, or a note to your accountant. Everything runs locally in your browser, so the income numbers you model here are never uploaded anywhere.

Free to use. Works in your browser. No signup, no login.