Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator
Enter your income goal, working schedule and business expenses to calculate the hourly rate you need to charge to hit your target.
How to Use This Tool
Enter your desired annual income
What you want to take home before tax, for the year.
Add your annual business expenses
Software, equipment, insurance — anything the business pays for.
Enter your working weeks and billable hours
Be realistic about how many hours you can actually bill per week.
Click "Calculate hourly rate"
Get the rate you need to charge to hit your target.
About the Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator
Setting an hourly rate by guessing, or simply matching what others in your field seem to charge, often leads to underpricing — especially once business expenses and non-billable time (marketing, admin, unpaid proposals) are factored in.
This calculator works backward from your actual income goal: it takes your desired annual take-home income, adds your business expenses (since those need to be covered by your rate too), and divides that total by your realistic annual billable hours — not your total working hours, since very few freelancers can bill 100% of their time.
The result is the minimum hourly rate you'd need to charge, assuming you hit your billable hours target, to cover both your income goal and your business costs — a useful floor to check your actual rates against.
Frequently Asked Questions
What counts as "billable hours" versus total working hours?
Billable hours are the hours you can actually invoice a client for — active project work. Total working hours also include unpaid time like sending proposals, marketing, admin, and client communication that isn't directly billable, which is why billable hours are almost always lower than total hours worked.
What's a realistic number of billable hours per week?
Many experienced freelancers report billing somewhere between 20-30 hours per week out of a 40-hour working week, since a meaningful portion of time goes to non-billable business tasks. New freelancers often bill even fewer hours initially while building a client base.
Should I include health insurance and retirement savings in my expenses?
Yes, if you're responsible for those costs yourself as a freelancer (rather than an employer providing them), they're real costs of doing business and should be factored into your target rate, alongside more obvious costs like software and equipment.
Does this calculator account for taxes?
No — this calculates the rate needed to reach a target income and cover business expenses, but doesn't factor in income tax specifically. Use the Freelance Tax Calculator alongside this one to understand your actual take-home after tax.
What if the calculated rate seems too high for my market?
If your calculated rate is higher than what your market typically pays, you may need to either increase your billable hours, reduce your income target, cut expenses, or focus on higher-value clients and services that can support a higher rate.
Should I round my hourly rate to a clean number?
Many freelancers do round to a clean number (like $75 or $100/hour) for simplicity in client conversations, generally rounding up slightly from the calculated minimum to build in a small buffer.