Earning & Workfreelance · pricing
Freelance Rate Calculator
Worldwide — arithmetic, no local rules
Your first client is real — now you have to name a number.
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
Related tools
- Steady Paycheck (Variable Income) — Turn an up-and-down income into a safe monthly salary and a right-sized buffer.
- Quit Runway (Can I Afford to Leave?) — How long your savings last after leaving a job — and whether new income overtakes costs before they run out.
- Unit Economics — LTV, LTV:CAC, and CAC payback — with the benchmarks that make them mean something.
- Break-Even — Units and revenue needed to cover costs — and how much pricing moves it.
Embed this calculator
Free to use on your own site. It keeps working as the rules change, because we maintain the data — no ads, no cookies, and a link back to the full tool.
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