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Tool · freelancing

Hourly rate calculator

A rate is not a reward for an hour. It is a ratio: how much money you need over a year, divided by the hours you actually sell in that year. Both numbers are usually calculated wrong — this form walks you through both.

What it is built on

Freelancing does not sell finished work, it sells capacity. An unsold Wednesday cannot be discounted in November — it simply disappears. That is why the price of a sold hour has to pay for the hours you failed to sell.

Billable hours are a fraction of the week. Sales, admin, learning, running your own shop and downtime do not vanish because you fail to log them — they only vanish from the rate calculation. The default 60 % is a rough guess; the real number comes from one honestly measured month.

The result is a floor, not a price. The calculation tells you what is not worth doing. What you can actually charge is decided by the market — and when the two numbers do not meet, that is information about your type of work or client segment, not about your worth.

Read next

The method and the wider money context for freelancing sit in the handbook:

Time as a commodity: capacity, rate and seasonalityWhere the calculation comes from, why billable hours are a fraction of the week and what to do with demand above your ceiling.Financial calmReserves, budget and the rhythm of payments — so the result has somewhere to land.

Your rate is worked out

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