| Total revenue needed | -- |
| Billable hours per year | -- |
| Hourly rate to charge | -- |
Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator
Turn a target income into the hourly rate you actually need to bill, once non-billable time and expenses are factored in.
How the rate is calculated
Total revenue needed = target income + business expenses. Divide that by your total billable hours for the year (billable hours per week × working weeks per year) to get the hourly rate you need to charge. Billable hours exclude time spent on admin, marketing, and unpaid work — exactly how much varies a lot by field, so use your own real ratio rather than a guess if you can.
Example: an $80,000 income target with $8,000 in expenses, 25 billable hours/week, and 48 working weeks a year needs $88,000 in revenue over 1,200 billable hours — about $73.33/hour.
Spread that same income across every hour you work, billable or not, and you get your effective hourly rate — always lower than the rate you bill.
For a rough sense of range: professional-services benchmarks compiled by Runn run from about 40% in legal services up to 80–90% for junior/technical roles, and a Freelancermap survey found many freelancers spending 10–20% of their time on non-billable work. Example: a $50,000 income target with $3,000 in expenses, 30 billable hours/week, and 50 working weeks needs $35.33/hour.
The most common mistake is entering a full 40-hour week as "billable hours" when only a fraction of that is realistically billable — that single input drives the computed rate more than any other.