Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator

This calculator turns a year you have to fund — pay, expenses, and a tax reserve — into an hourly floor on the hours you can actually invoice. It is the right tool when a client asks for a number, when a profile rate has drifted, or when you are comparing freelance life with a salary that still looks cheaper per hour.

The metric is misleading when billable hours are a fantasy. A $70 rate on 40 billed hours a week looks like $145,600 a year before expenses. Most independent operators do not invoice 40 hours: sales, admin, revisions that were never scoped, and unpaid leave eat the week. The same $70 on 20 billed hours is $72,800 of revenue, which may not clear the year after expenses and tax. The rate did not change. The capacity assumption did.

The common manual mistake is to divide a desired salary by 2,080 hours (52 × 40) and call that a freelance rate. That is an employee conversion, not a contractor floor. It omits unpaid time, business expenses, and the tax the employer used to withhold and match. People then charge $42, match a job they left, and cannot replace the job.

Ava wants $68,000 of personal income. Tools, insurance, and accounting are $8,400. She reserves $16,000 for tax. That is $92,400. She works 46 weeks and bills 18 hours of a 35-hour week. Capacity is 828 hours. Required rate is $92,400 ÷ 828 ≈ $111.59. She currently charges $80. At 828 hours that is $66,240 of revenue — about $26,000 short of the year she typed. Raising utilization to 22 hours drops the required rate to about $91.30; it does not make $80 a full-year price unless expenses or income targets also fall.

Treat the result as a floor, not a brand position. It is not tax advice, and it assumes the billable hours exist. If the market will not pay the floor, the honest options are different work, fewer expenses, a second income, or fewer personal-income dollars — not pretending 40 hours will invoice themselves.