"What should I charge?" — answered with honest math. Your income goal, real billable hours, time off, overhead, and the benefits you now fund yourself, turned into an hourly rate you can defend.
| Target income | — |
| + Benefits & self-employment uplift | — |
| + Business expenses | — |
| Revenue you need to bill | — |
| ÷ Billable hours per year | — |
| If you actually bill… | Hours / year | Required rate |
|---|
The most common pricing mistake in freelancing is beautiful in its simplicity: take your old salary, divide by 2,080 hours, and charge that. It feels rigorous. It's also how people accidentally take a 40% pay cut — because a salary comes bundled with things an hourly rate has to buy separately, and a freelancer's week contains far fewer billable hours than an employee's contains paid ones.
(target income × (1 + uplift) + expenses) ÷ (hours/week × billable% × working weeks) — then rounded up to the next $5, because "$119.57" invites haggling and "$120" doesn't. The day and week rates are the same math at client-friendly granularity.
Every freelance-rate formula lives or dies on the billable-hours guess, so instead of hiding it, the table shows your required rate at 15, 20, 25, and 30 billable hours a week. If your business plan only works at 30 billable hours — a level most solo freelancers never sustain — you'll see it before your bank account does. Price against the row you can actually deliver.
Start from the income you want, add your business expenses and the benefits you now fund yourself, then divide by the hours you will genuinely bill (not 40 a week, and not 52 weeks a year). The calculator runs that honest math and shows hourly, day, and week rates.
Because that prices in zero vacation, zero sick days, zero admin time, zero equipment, and zero health insurance. Freelancers who price that way quietly earn far less than they did employed. The calculator makes each missing piece explicit.
Most freelancers bill 50 to 75 percent of working hours; the rest goes to finding work, invoicing, and running the business. Set your billable share honestly and watch how much it moves the required rate in the sensitivity table.
The salary-equivalent view converts your current rate back into employee terms after expenses and benefits, which answers the real question: is this working better than the job did?
The calculator gives you all three anchored to the same income goal. Day rates suit on-site and consulting work; project pricing works when you can scope tightly. Whatever you quote, it should trace back to a rate that funds your actual life.