Freelance Rate Calculator Guide

A salary divided by 2,080 hours is rarely a sustainable freelance rate. Independent work includes non-billable administration, business expenses, time off, and a tax reserve.

How to use the Freelance Rate Calculator

1. Set the annual take-home target and annual business expenses.
2. Estimate realistic billable hours after sales, admin, and leave.
3. Enter a tax reserve percentage and run the calculator.

A practical example

A $70,000 target plus $10,000 expenses across 1,200 billable hours requires more than $66.67 per hour before the tax reserve is considered. Reserving 25 percent raises the required billed rate further.

The Freelance Rate Calculator runs locally in the browser, so the input is available for the calculation without being uploaded by this tool.

Checks before you use the output

• Treat the result as a planning estimate, not tax advice.
• Billable hours are usually much lower than total working hours.
• Add payment fees and contingency if they are not included in expenses.

Use the result as part of a review

Estimate an hourly freelance rate from income, expenses, tax reserve, and billable hours. The output is designed to make a small task faster, but it should still be checked against the requirements of the destination system, document, or decision.

Privacy and safe sample data

Processing happens in the current browser tab. Even so, remove passwords, authorization values, customer records, and other confidential data before copying results into chat, tickets, or public examples.