20% fewer billable hours
$83.34/hr floor
20 hours/week · 960 hours/year
Free freelance rate calculator
Freelance Rate & Project Pricing Workbench
Know your floor, then choose your next move. Enter your income goal, your real business costs and the hours you can actually bill, and the calculator works out the lowest hourly rate that funds the plan. Then test a client's offer against it, see what fewer hours or payment fees would do, and price a fixed project.
By Andrew James Flores, Nathan Management · Updated September 23, 2026 · Editorial Standards
Free · No signup · US dollars · Pre-tax planning figures
01 / Build your baseline
What does your work need to earn?
The form starts with an example plan: a $75,000 income goal, $5,000 of yearly business costs, 25 billable hours a week and 4 weeks off. Replace each number with your own records. Billable hours deserve the most care: in this example, dropping from 25 to 20 hours a week raises the floor from $66.67 to $83.34.
Assumptions and limits. Every figure is in US dollars and is before personal income tax and self-employment tax, so none of it is take-home pay. The rate floor covers the budget you enter; what clients in your market will pay, payment timing, sales tax and contract terms are separate questions. Build your tax estimate with the IRS Self-Employed Individuals Tax Center, the estimated-tax guide, or a qualified adviser.
02 / Stress-test the plan
What if your calendar changes?
The three cards keep your annual budget, weeks off and payment assumptions fixed and move only billable hours: 20% fewer, the hours you entered, and 20% more. Scenarios stop at the model's 0.1–168 billable hours per week limits; a limited scenario is labelled and may differ by less than 20%.
Your baseline
$66.67/hr floor
25 hours/week · 1,200 hours/year
20% more billable hours
$55.56/hr floor
30 hours/week · 1,440 hours/year
Example: five calendars, one budget
The table runs the example plan across five weekly schedules and tests each one against an $80 hourly rate. Budget: $75,000 income goal plus $5,000 of business costs, 4 weeks off, every invoice collected and no payment fees.
| Billable hours per week | Annual billable hours | Rate floor | Invoiced at $80/hr | Pre-tax income at $80/hr | Versus $75,000 goal |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 15 | 720 | $111.12 | $57,600.00 | $52,600.00 | −$22,400.00 |
| 20 | 960 | $83.34 | $76,800.00 | $71,800.00 | −$3,200.00 |
| 25 (example) | 1,200 | $66.67 | $96,000.00 | $91,000.00 | +$16,000.00 |
| 30 | 1,440 | $55.56 | $115,200.00 | $110,200.00 | +$35,200.00 |
| 35 | 1,680 | $47.62 | $134,400.00 | $129,400.00 | +$54,400.00 |
Read the table from the middle. At $80 an hour this plan breaks even at 20.83 billable hours a week: below that the rate falls short of the goal, and above it each extra hour sold adds $80 of pre-tax income. The floor drops quickly at first and then flattens. Going from 15 to 20 hours a week lowers it by $27.78; going from 30 to 35 lowers it by only $7.94.
Recommended: when your calendar is uncertain, set your floor from the hours you are confident of selling rather than the hours you hope to sell. An optimistic hours figure is the quickest way to arrive at a rate that looks affordable and then leaves you short.
03 / Compare your choices
Keep the trade-offs in view.
Keep up to three plans while you adjust costs, hours or prices; a kept plan stays as it was when you edit the form. Comparisons are most useful when two small changes stack. Keeping a plan with 20 billable hours a week and a 3% card fee beside the example plan shows that the pair lifts the floor from $66.67 to $85.92 and turns a $16,000.00 cushion at $80 an hour into a $5,504.00 shortfall. The illustrative card below shows that plan; your own kept plans replace it.
Illustration: 20 hours a week, 3% card fees
$85.92/hr
20 billable hrs/week · 4 weeks off
$75,000.00 pre-tax income goal · $5,000.00 costs and benefits
100% collection · 3% fees
At $80.00/hr: $69,496.00 pre-tax annual income
04 / Check a fixed-price project
What must this project invoice to cover costs?
This check spreads your annual rate floor over one project. Count every hour the project will take, including meetings, revisions and handoff, and enter only project-specific costs, such as a font or stock-photo license, a subcontractor or travel, that are not already in your annual budget.
$900.00 total project quote floor, using the current annual plan. Time allocation: 12 planned hours × unrounded hourly floor = $800.00. Direct-cost recovery: $100.00 ÷ 100% retained = $100.00. Total uses unrounded components and rounds upward to cents. Additional profit margin and applicable sales tax are not included.
This is the break-even quote for the project. Treat it as the least you can accept, then add margin for the value you deliver and the risk you carry. Author's practice: quote 10–20% above the floor, which turns the $900.00 example into $990.00 to $1,080.00. If this client's payment terms or fees differ from your annual assumptions, change them in section 01 before quoting.
The method / no black box
You should be able to check every number.
Andrew prices and invoices his own service work and built this calculator to replace guesswork with a formula. The formula is short enough to check by hand, and the complete source is published at /calc.js.
1. Build a budget without counting anything twice
Your required retained revenue is personal pre-tax income + operating costs + benefits budget. Enter each cost once: a software subscription goes in operating costs, a percentage payment fee goes in the fee field, and health insurance goes in benefits. Using real dollar amounts for benefits avoids an unexplained salary multiplier. Time off works on the other side of the formula by removing billable weeks. In the example, taking 8 weeks off instead of 4 raises the floor from $66.67 to $72.73, and 12 weeks off raises it to $80.00.
2. Convert invoices into money retained
Retention = collection percentage × (1 − fee percentage), expressed as decimals. At 90% collection and a 10% fee, you keep 0.90 × 0.90 = 81% of what you invoice. Dividing your budget by 0.81 covers the gap exactly. Adding 19% to the budget falls short, because the fee and the write-offs also apply to the extra amount you invoice.
| Payment assumption | Invoices collected | Fee on collected payments | Share you keep | Must invoice | Rate floor | Pre-tax income at $80/hr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Example plan | 100% | 0% | 100% | $80,000.00 | $66.67 | $91,000.00 |
| 3% card fee | 100% | 3% | 97% | $82,474.23 | $68.73 | $88,120.00 |
| 3% write-offs, 3% fees | 97% | 3% | 94.09% | $85,024.98 | $70.86 | $85,326.40 |
| 5% write-offs, 5% fees | 95% | 5% | 90.25% | $88,642.66 | $73.87 | $81,640.00 |
| 10% write-offs, 10% fees | 90% | 10% | 81% | $98,765.43 | $82.31 | $72,760.00 |
| 20% platform fee | 100% | 20% | 80% | $100,000.00 | $83.34 | $71,800.00 |
A 3% card fee on its own adds $2.06 an hour to the floor. Losing 10% to write-offs and 10% to fees together adds $15.64 an hour and, at an $80 rate, turns the $16,000.00 cushion into a $2,240.00 shortfall. Fees and unpaid invoices are easy to leave out of a quote and expensive to ignore.
annual billable hours = hours/week × (52 − weeks off)
retention = (collection % / 100) × (1 − fee % / 100)
rate floor = (income + costs + benefits) / retention
/ annual billable hoursFloors are rounded up to the cent.
3. Interpret the result as a constraint
With the example's $75,000 pre-tax income goal, $5,000 costs, no separately budgeted benefits, 25 hours per week and 4 weeks off, the budget is $80,000 across 1,200 billable hours. With no fees and full collection, the unrounded floor is $66.666…/hour, and the calculator shows $66.67/hour, rounded up. Personal income tax and self-employment tax still come out of the $75,000.
Suppose, as an illustration, a client offers $60 an hour. Billing the planned 1,200 hours at $60 brings in $72,000.00, which leaves $67,000.00 of pre-tax income after the $5,000 of costs: $8,000.00 short of the goal. The calculator also reports the hours that would close the gap, 27.78 billable hours a week. The levers are the same four every time: a higher rate, more hours you can genuinely sell and deliver, lower costs, or a smaller income goal. A higher calculated rate does not create demand, so check the number against quotes you have actually won and lost.
4. Translate time into a project cost check
Planned project hours = estimated hours × (1 + extra-time allowance). The quote floor is planned hours × unrounded hourly floor + project-only direct costs ÷ retention. In the example, a 10-hour project with a 20% allowance becomes 12 planned hours; 12 × $66.666… = $800.00, plus $100.00 of direct costs, gives a $900.00 floor. Direct costs are divided by retention because fees and write-offs also apply to the part of the invoice that repays them.
How to make the plan reliable
- Track at least four representative weeks of actual time, including sales, admin and gaps between projects, and use the billable share as your weekly hours. Your own records beat any “typical freelancer” figure.
- Take fee and write-off percentages from your own payment statements and invoice history. Late payment strains cash flow even when every invoice is eventually paid, so keep a separate cash buffer.
- Keep every figure in the same currency and time period. The calculator works in US dollars per year and does not convert currencies.
- Treat the benefits field as a cash budget. Whether a cost is deductible belongs in your tax estimate, not in this plan.
- Compare the floor with the rates you actually win. The benchmarking guide explains how to compare employee wages and advertised rates with freelance pricing.
- Re-run the plan when something structural changes, such as a new platform fee, a price increase or a quieter quarter.
Read the calculation source · Explore the rate floor tables · Report a calculation or source error