Pricing
The hourly rate, day rate, and project price that still pay you after tax and the hours you cannot bill.
This freelance rate calculator starts from the money you want in your pocket. Dividing a salary by 2,080 is how people publish a number that cannot pay the rent.
Billable hours are the weeks you bill times the hours you can invoice in a week.
If expenses are deductible, revenue equals expenses, plus take-home divided by (1 minus the tax rate). Tax is on profit. The other reading, (expenses plus take-home) divided by (1 minus the tax rate), grosses expenses up as if they were salary.
The floor is that revenue divided by billable hours. A slow-month buffer increases the take-home you gross up. It does not mark up expenses. A platform fee is divided out afterwards, because the marketplace keeps a cut of the invoice. A revision buffer only stretches the project price. The quote on this page is rounded up to the cent, so an hour times your billable hours is not under the revenue.
A day rate is the invoice rate times the hours you sell as a day. VAT, if you charge it, is extra on the quote. This page does not add it.
I opened the calculators that come up for this search. Some divide a target salary by 2,080. Some add the tax percent on top of an after-tax number, which is too low. Some gross up expenses that are already deductible. Some are lists of other tools, or a form that hides the number until you sign up.
I left out market-rate tables. Your costs are yours. What someone else invoices is a different question.
If you type 40, the calculator will obey, and the rate will look comfortingly small. Those 40 hours include the proposal, the invoice, and the Tuesday with no client. Twenty to twenty-five billable hours is the band I would type for a solo week. The default here is 20, across 46 weeks: 920 hours. Do not leave it at 2,080.
If the floor looks high, you typed hours you will not bill, or the take-home is more than this year will produce. Cutting the rate to make the quote easier leaves the costs unpaid.
The floor is your number. Their range is still unknown. Asking "what's your budget?" hands them the first number, or they hand it back and you speak into the silence.
When you want both ranges in before either of you sees the other, that is how FairPrice works. The drawing on that page is one range at $800 to $1,500 and the other at $1,000 to $2,000. The overlap is $1,000 to $1,500, and the price on that drawing is $1,250, the midpoint of the overlap. A gap up to 15% of the narrower range is still a match, at the midpoint of the gap. Wider than that is a miss.
Use the floor first. If the floor itself is the thing you keep flinching at, the signs are in signs you're undercharging. If you have never set a rate, start with the first-time rate. Hourly against a fixed project price is a separate choice.
Weeks times billable hours. When expenses are deductible, revenue equals expenses, plus take-home divided by (1 minus the tax rate). The floor is that revenue divided by the hours.
I would type 20 to 25 in a week you thought was 40. Count a year of that, not 52 times 40.
Yes, by dividing take-home by (1 minus the tax rate). The box wants one effective percent of profit. US self-employment tax is 15.3% of 92.35% of net earnings, the Social Security part stops at the wage base, and half of that tax is deductible before income tax. Do not paste 15.3 in and call it done.
Multiply the invoice rate by the hours you will sell as a day. Six or seven is more honest than eight. If you are VAT registered, add VAT on the quote. This calculator does not.