Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator

Salary divided by 2,080 hours is not a freelance rate

If you take $80,000 and divide by 40 hours x 52 weeks, you get $38.46/hr. That number ignores tax, software, and the hours you will never invoice. Then a client asks for a discount and you are working for grocery money. This calculator grosses take-home and overhead through tax, then divides by real billable hours after PTO.

Defaults: $80,000 take-home, $5,000 overhead, 25% tax, 4 weeks PTO, 25 billable hours per week. Gross = (80,000 + 5,000) / (1 - 0.25) = $113,333.33. Working weeks = 52 - 4 = 48. Annual hours = 48 x 25 = 1,200. Hourly = 113,333.33 / 1,200 = $94.44/hr. Daily (x 8) = $755.56.

Gross = (take-home + overhead) / (1 - tax%)
Weeks = 52 - PTO weeks
Hours = weeks x billable hours/week
Hourly = gross / hours · Daily = hourly x 8

Copy exports take-home, overhead, tax, PTO, weekly hours, annual hours, gross, hourly, and daily as plain text. If working weeks or billable hours are 0 (or tax hits 100%, which this slider will not allow past 50%), the outputs show n/a, a role=alert banner fires, and copy is disabled.

Billable hours are not desk hours

A 40-hour week with 25 billed hours is a normal independent practice: proposals, bookkeeping, unpaid revisions, and tool maintenance fill the rest. Enter 45 billed hours and the rate looks cheap because you pretended admin does not exist. This page flags billable hours above 40 with a tip. Keep 20 to 30 unless you have a productized service and a VA.

PTO is weeks, not days. Four weeks is 100 hours you cannot sell at the 25-hour default. Leave PTO at 0 and December will miss the annual number. Max PTO is 12 weeks (40 working weeks). Min billable hours is 5, enough for a side practice, not a living at $80,000 take-home: the hourly will jump, which is the point.

Tax 25% is a starting combined estimate for US self-employment plus income tax, not your return. High-tax states and thin deductions need a higher slider. Payment processing is not in this model: after you have $94.44, run the invoice through the Stripe Fee Calculator or PayPal Fee Calculator so the net still clears the floor.

Use the floor, then quote a project

$94.44 is internal. Round the invoice up, not down. Convert a two-week, 50-hour site build to $4,722 plus a buffer, or open the Freelance Rate and Project Scope Calculator if you want a profit margin on top of a similar gross-up. Do not match a W-2 hourly by dividing salary by 2,080. That employee costs benefits and employer tax you are paying yourself.

Recalculate when overhead changes (new health premium, new laptop) or when utilization changes. If you only billed 18 hours a week last quarter, put 18 in the box and raise the rate. The copy summary is the artifact to paste into a rate card or a conversation with an accountant. It is not a filing position.

A $10,000 take-home with $0 overhead, 0% tax, 0 PTO, and 50 billable hours is a math toy: 52 x 50 = 2,600 hours, $10,000 / 2,600 = $3.85/hr. That is why the take-home minimum is $10,000 and why 25 hours is the default. Price the practice you have, including the unpaid week. If Stripe takes 2.9% + $0.30, a $94.44 invoice nets about $91.40: raise the quote so the net still clears $94.44. Upwork's 10% fee is another layer: use the Upwork Fee Calculator before you paste a rate into a proposal.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)