This free freelance rate calculator works out the hourly, day, and project rate you need to charge to hit your target take-home income. It starts from the money you actually want to keep, then adds back the tax you owe, the expenses you carry, and the unpaid hours no client ever pays for. The result is the honest floor for your pricing — the number below which freelancing quietly costs you money. Works in any currency, with no signup.
What you want to keep in your pocket after tax and business costs.
Software, equipment, subscriptions, insurance, accounting, etc.
Share of revenue you reserve for tax.
A buffer on top for growth and slow months.
52 minus holiday, sick, and admin weeks.
Everything: client work plus admin and sales.
Only the hours you can actually invoice.
Used to work out your day rate.
Billable hours in a typical project, used for the project quote below.
Charge at least
$76.52/hour
to keep $60,000.00 a year after tax and expenses.
Day rate
$612.17
8-hour day
Project quote
$3,060.87
40 billable hrs
Required annual revenue
$88,000.00
before tax & expenses
Billable hours / year
1,150
of 1,840 worked
Effective take-home
$60,000.00
after $22,000.00 tax and $6,000.00 expenses
Only 62.5% of your worked hours are billable. That is 690 unpaid hours a year on admin, sales, and downtime — time your rate has to cover.
A salaried worker on $60,000.00 earns about $28.85/hour (salary ÷ 2,080 hours). Your freelance rate of $76.52/hour is 2.7× higher because you cover your own tax, expenses, benefits, and unpaid hours.
Charging the right rate is only half the battle. Auritrack tracks your freelance income, expenses, and tax set-aside automatically so you always know what you are really keeping.
Try Auritrack FreeEnter the annual take-home income you want to keep after tax and business costs, plus your yearly business expenses like software, equipment, and insurance.
Enter the percentage of revenue you set aside for tax (25% is a common starting point) and, optionally, a profit margin to build in a buffer for slow months and growth.
Add the weeks you actually work per year (52 minus holiday, sick, and admin time), the hours you work each week, and how many of those hours are genuinely billable.
Enter the hours in a working day and the size of a typical project so the calculator can turn your hourly rate into a day rate and a ready-to-quote project fee.
See the minimum hourly rate you must charge, plus your day rate, project quote, required annual revenue, and how many of your worked hours are actually billable.
The most common freelance pricing mistake is taking a desired salary, dividing it by 2,080 working hours, and calling that an hourly rate. A £60,000 salary becomes roughly £29 an hour, and it feels reasonable. It isn’t. That figure assumes someone else pays your income tax, funds your pension, covers your sick days, buys your equipment, and keeps you busy 40 hours a week. As a freelancer, you pay for all of it. A salaried employee’s £60,000 costs their employer far more once tax, benefits, office space, software, and idle time are added in. Your rate has to rebuild that full cost from scratch, which is why a genuine freelance equivalent of a £60,000 salary often lands somewhere between two and three times the naive per-hour figure. Charging the naive number doesn’t make you competitive; it makes you a business that loses money on every hour it sells.
This is the insight that changes everything, and it is the one most freelancers learn too late. The hours you work and the hours you can bill are not the same number. Every week you spend time on marketing, proposals, invoicing, email, client calls that go nowhere, learning new tools, and simply looking for the next project. None of it is billable, and all of it is essential. A realistic freelancer bills perhaps 25 to 30 hours out of a 40-hour week, which means only 60% to 75% of your working time earns money directly. Over a year the gap is enormous: work 46 weeks at 40 hours and you put in 1,840 hours, but at 25 billable hours a week you only invoice 1,150 of them. Your rate has to recover your entire income target from those 1,150 hours, not from the full 1,840. If you price against worked hours instead of billable hours, you build a shortfall into every single invoice. This is also why chasing more hours rarely fixes a low rate — there are only so many billable hours to sell, so the durable fix is charging more for each one.
Two costs sit between the revenue you bill and the money you keep: tax and expenses. Tax is the one that catches new freelancers out, because the money lands in your account looking like income right up until a bill arrives months later. A safe habit is to move 25% to 30% of every payment into a separate account the moment it clears, so your tax is always covered and you never spend it by accident. The exact percentage depends on where you live and what you earn, so treat the default here as a starting point and confirm it with our tax estimator or a local accountant. Expenses are more visible but easy to underestimate: software subscriptions, hardware, a co-working desk, professional insurance, accounting fees, training, and the slow drip of small tools all add up. This calculator builds both back into your rate, so the take-home figure it protects is money you genuinely get to keep. To see how the same revenue translates into net pay once tax is applied, compare the result with our take-home pay calculator.
Your hourly rate is the foundation, but it is rarely the thing you quote. Day rates suit work that naturally comes in full-day blocks, like consulting, workshops, or on-site sessions, and clients often find a single daily number easier to approve than a running hourly tab. Project or fixed-fee pricing is where experienced freelancers make the most, because the client pays for the outcome rather than the clock — and if your skill lets you deliver in half the time, you keep the difference. The safe way to set any of these is the same: start from your true hourly rate, estimate the billable hours honestly, add a margin for the unexpected, then present the total in whatever form the client prefers. This calculator does exactly that, turning your hourly floor into a day rate and a ready-to-send project quote. When it is time to turn that quote into a paid invoice, our free invoice generator creates a clean, professional document in a couple of minutes.
Most freelancers charge too little for too long, then resent it. The fix is to raise rates regularly and without drama. Increase the price you quote to new clients first; once a few of them accept it, you have proof the market will bear the number, and raising it with existing clients becomes far easier. When you do give notice to current clients, keep it short: name the new rate, name the date it starts, thank them, and resist the urge to write a paragraph of justification. Small annual increases of 10% to 20% are rarely questioned when your work is good, and they compound far more gently than one nervous jump every five years. If a client leaves over a fair increase, they were usually your least profitable one, and the hours they freed up are now available for better-paying work. Re-run this calculator whenever your income goals, expenses, or available time change, and treat the number it gives you as a floor to build on rather than a ceiling to apologise for.
Create professional invoices with auto-calculated line items and tax, then download a clean PDF. No signup, works in any currency.
Turn your gross salary into net take-home pay after tax, retirement, and other deductions — shown per year, month, and paycheck.
Estimate your federal and state tax liability, see your effective tax rate, and use AI to find deductions you might be missing.
Find your gross and net profit margin, markup, and profit from cost and price, and see what a healthy margin looks like for your business.
For Freelancers
Auritrack tracks your freelance income, expenses, and tax set-aside automatically, so the take-home number you priced for is the number you really end up with. Supports every currency with AI-powered live exchange rates. Free to start.
Disclaimer: This tool is provided for informational and educational purposes only. It does not constitute financial, tax, investment, or legal advice. Results are estimates based on the inputs you provide and may not reflect actual financial outcomes. Always consult a qualified financial professional before making financial decisions.
