//Free tool

freelance rate calculator

Somewhere in your head is a number that your year depends on and that you have never written down. This works it out: the rate below which the income you want, at the hours you can honestly bill, does not add up. It is a floor, not a price.

Your numbers

What you want to earn before tax — the number your life actually needs.
Software, gear, insurance, workspace, accounting — the cost of the business existing.
Holidays, sick days, and the dry spells — be honest, they happen.
Client-billable only. Admin, selling, and email aren't billable — most independents land at 20–25.
Safety margin for slow months and invoices that pay late. 15% is a sane default.

Your floor

Floor hourly

$87

Floor day rate

$696

With buffer — hourly

$100

With buffer — day

$800

The math, shown:

$88,000 needed ÷ (46 billable weeks × 22 billable hours) = $87/hour before buffer.

Charge below the buffered number and the year only adds up if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong — that’s what the buffer is for.

Why a floor beats a going rate

Published freelance rates disagree with each other by a factor of three. Surveyed web designers reported a median near $93 an hour in one 2025 coaching survey (State of Web Designer Pricing, Web Designer Academy, 2025), while the broad job aggregators put roughly the same title nearer $35 (ZipRecruiter, 2026). Both are real numbers about different populations, and neither knows your costs, your city, or how many weeks you take off. The floor does, because you told it. Price projects on what they are worth to the client; the surveys, compared are only there to check that your floor is not absurd.

Common questions

How do I calculate my freelance hourly rate?
Add the income you want for the year to what the business costs to run, then divide by the hours you can genuinely bill: the weeks you will actually work, times the client-billable hours in each. That number is your floor. Add a margin of ten to twenty per cent for the slow months and the invoices that pay late, and treat the result as the line you never quote below rather than the price you quote.
How many billable hours a week is realistic?
Fewer than forty by a long way. Selling, admin, email, invoicing and the unpaid connective work of running a business take a large share of the week, and most independents land somewhere around twenty to twenty-five client-billable hours. Dividing your income goal by forty hours a week is the single most common way a freelancer's rate ends up too low without their noticing.
Is the floor what I should charge clients?
It is what you should never charge below. For a defined project, price what the outcome is worth to the client and use the floor only to check that the answer is not absurd. The floor protects the year; it says nothing about what a particular piece of work is worth to a particular buyer, which is the number that actually sets the price.
Does this calculator store my numbers?
No. It runs entirely in your browser; nothing you type is sent, stored or logged anywhere, and you can check that by turning off your connection and running it again.