Freelance Rate Calculator

How to calculate your freelance hourly rate

A freelance rate isn't a market price you copy from someone else. It's a floor: the number that has to cover your income goal, your business costs, the weeks you take off, and all the hours you spend on admin instead of paid client work. Charge below it and the month doesn't work. The calculator above runs the full method, but here's what it's doing under the hood.

1. Required revenue

Add your desired take-home income to your annual business expenses. That total is the revenue your billable work has to generate before you've earned a cent for yourself.

2. Real billable hours

This is where most freelancers underprice themselves. You won't bill 52 weeks × 40 hours. Subtract your weeks off, then remember that admin, marketing, invoicing and proposals are usually not billable. The calculator uses your billable hours per week directly, so enter the hours you genuinely invoice, not the hours you sit at the desk.

3. The division and the buffer

Divide required revenue by your real billable hours to get a break-even rate. Then the calculator adds a tax buffer and a profit margin on top, because a rate that only covers costs leaves you nothing for a bad month or actual profit.

A worked example

Want $60,000 take-home, with $10,000 of expenses, billing 30 hours a week and taking 6 weeks off? That's $70,000 over roughly 1,380 billable hours, about $51/hour break-even, climbing past $70/hour once tax and profit are included. That last number is your floor. It's far above the "$40 feels fair" gut number most people start with.

Using it as a day rate calculator

Plenty of freelancers quote by the day rather than the hour. The calculator has you covered: next to your hourly figure it shows a per-day rate based on an 8-hour day, so you can read off both at once. If your billable day is shorter or longer than eight hours, scale that number to match before you send a quote.

Now keep your floor in view

Calculating your floor rate is only half the battle. The rate you set and the rate you actually earn are rarely the same, thanks to scope creep, under-quoted projects and unbilled time. The gap between them is your effective hourly rate, and it's the number that quietly slips below your floor. That's where CronLoom comes in: set this floor once, and it flags every client and fixed bid whose real rate drifts under it, while there's still room to act. Read more in our full guide or how to track billable hours across multiple clients.