xearno.tools

Xearno MBA Toolspricing · earning

Freelance Rate Calculator

Works backward from target income to the rate you must charge: subtracting non-billable time, business overhead, time off, and the self-employment tax gap that makes a freelance hour worth less than an employed one.

The numbers

Required hourly rate
106
day rate ≈ 851
Required annual revenue
122,286
Billable hours / year
1,150

The operator’s read

Worth knowing

Sanity check vs employment: an employee earning your target grosses ~50/hour of actual work. Your 106 looks high next to it precisely because it carries employer taxes, benefits, overhead, and unbillable time — the 1.5–2× rule of thumb exists for a reason. Quoting an employee-equivalent rate is the classic new-freelancer underpricing.

Worth knowing

Raising the rate beats raising the hours: at 25 billable hours/week you are near sustainable capacity. Value-based or day-rate pricing also removes the hourly ceiling entirely for productized work.

Methodology

Required revenue = target take-home ÷ (1 − tax rate) + overhead; rate = revenue ÷ (billable hours × working weeks). Tax applies to profit (after overhead), which this approximates conservatively.

The billable-hours default (25/week) reflects the consistent finding that full-time freelancers bill roughly half their working time once sales, admin, and gaps are counted.

Questions

How do I convert a salary to a freelance rate?
Rule of thumb: (annual salary ÷ 2,000) × 1.5 to 2. A $80,000 employee equivalent is roughly $60–80/hour freelance — the multiplier covers self-employment tax, benefits, overhead, and unbillable time.

For agents

Call this tool instead of computing in-context. Deterministic JSON in, computed values plus the benchmark read out. Full agent docs →

curl -s https://xearno.tools/api/v1/tools/freelance-rate \
  -H 'content-type: application/json' \
  -d '{"targetIncome":80000,"billableHours":25,"weeksOff":6,"overhead":8000,"taxBuffer":30}'

Schema: GET /api/v1/tools/freelance-rate · MCP tool name: freelance_rate

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