Freelance Rate Calculator
Calculate the hourly rate you need to charge to hit your income goals.
Assumptions used in this calculation
- Fixed billable hours and weeks worked: Assumes a constant number of billable hours per week and weeks worked per year; it doesn't account for slow periods, unpaid time off, or ramp-up time when starting out.
About this calculator
New freelancers often price their time using a naive calculation, like dividing a desired salary by 2,000 full-time hours, without realizing that far fewer hours in a year are actually billable once admin, marketing, unpaid pitching and time off are accounted for, which leads to systematically underpricing their work. This calculator takes a desired annual income, annual business expenses, billable hours per week and weeks worked per year, and computes the hourly rate needed to cover both the income goal and expenses across only the hours that are actually billed to clients. Working this out by hand means correctly separating billable from total hours worked and remembering to fold business expenses into the target, both easy to shortcut under pressure to just "pick a number." This calculator gives freelancers and independent contractors a defensible, math-backed rate to quote, rather than guessing at what feels reasonable.
Worked example
₹12,00,000 desired income, ₹2,00,000 expenses, 25 billable hrs/wk, 48 weeks
Result: Hourly rate ≈ ₹1,167
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