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Freelance rate calculator

Calculate your ideal hourly rate with full breakdown, rate card export, and market comparison.

Free & unlimitedWorks offline
Country

Paid leave: No federal statutory paid leave — the FLSA does not require paid vacation or holidays, so 2 weeks is a customary figure, not a right.

Tax placeholder: Self-employment tax is 15.3 % (12.4 % Social Security up to the annual wage base + 2.9 % Medicare) on top of federal and state income tax. The percentage below is an editable planning figure, not a calculated tax bill.

VAT / moms / MwSt / BTW is deliberately excluded: you collect it on top of the rate and hand it to the tax office, so it is not a cost of the business.

Presets
Annual salary goal
USD

What you want to take home (before personal tax)

Billable hours / week
Weeks off / year
Tax rate
%
Monthly expenses
USD
Profit buffer

Extra buffer for savings, growth, and dry spells

Enter your salary goal and work schedule to calculate your rate

Try a preset above to get started

All processing happens in your browser. No data is sent to any server.

The rate you need is not a market opinion, it is arithmetic: the money you want to keep, plus the money the business spends, plus the money the tax office takes, divided by the hours you can actually bill. This calculator runs that chain in the right order — it grosses the target up for tax rather than subtracting tax from it, which is the mistake that leaves freelancers short — and then divides by billable hours, not working hours. Five country presets set the currency, the statutory paid leave an employee in that country gets (the leave you now have to fund yourself), and a starting tax percentage. Everything stays editable, because a self-employed tax bill depends on schemes and thresholds no calculator can guess, and the page says so instead of pretending otherwise.

Key facts about Freelance rate calculator

Key facts about Freelance rate calculator
Order of operations(take-home target + annual expenses) / (1 - tax) / (1 - profit buffer) / billable hours
Why gross uptaking 30 % off a target leaves you 30 % short; the target has to be divided by 0.70, not multiplied by it
Billable hourshours per week x (52 - weeks off) — admin, sales and downtime are excluded by lowering the weekly figure
Country presetsUnited States, United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands — currency, statutory leave and a starting tax rate
US statutory leavenone — the FLSA does not require paid vacation or paid holidays, so the preset's 2 weeks is custom, not law
UK statutory leave5.6 weeks (28 days on a 5-day week) under the Working Time Regulations 1998, bank holidays included
German statutory leave20 working days minimum under the Bundesurlaubsgesetz, plus 9–13 public holidays depending on the Land
Danish statutory leave25 paid days under the Holiday Act (ferieloven), earned at 2.08 days per month
Dutch statutory leavefour times the weekly hours under Article 7:634 of the Civil Code — 20 days on a full-time week
VAT is excluded on purposeVAT / moms / MwSt / BTW is collected on top of the rate and remitted, so it is not a business cost and must not be built into the rate
Tax percentageseditable planning placeholders for income tax plus social contributions, not a computed liability
Benchmarks are USDthe built-in role ranges are US dollar figures and are hidden when the rate is calculated in another currency

What happens to your file

Nothing is uploaded and nothing is stored. Your salary target, expenses, tax rate and hours live in React state inside this tab; the whole calculation is four divisions executed by JavaScript on your own machine, and the page makes no network request while you use it. Exporting the rate card writes the text to your clipboard via the browser's own clipboard API — it does not pass through a server. There is no account, no analytics event carrying your figures, and no local storage, so closing the tab erases the lot. That is deliberate: an income target and a cost base are exactly the numbers a freelancer should not be leaving on someone else's machine.

About this tool

  1. 1

    Pick your country

    This sets the currency, fills in the statutory paid leave an employee there receives, and drops in a starting tax percentage. The note underneath says which of those is law and which is a placeholder.

  2. 2

    Set the take-home target

    Enter what you want to end up with, before personal tax — the figure you would compare against a salaried job offer, not your desired revenue.

  3. 3

    Be honest about billable hours

    The weekly figure is hours you can invoice, not hours you work. Most full-time freelancers bill 25 to 30 of a 40-hour week; the rest goes to sales, admin, invoicing and unpaid revisions.

  4. 4

    Fund your own time off

    The weeks-off field is pre-filled with the statutory employee entitlement for your country. An employee gets those weeks paid; a freelancer pays for them out of the rate, which is exactly what removing them from the billable year does.

  5. 5

    Add real business expenses

    Software, insurance, accountancy, hardware amortisation, coworking, pension contributions and training, per month. Leave VAT out — you collect it and pass it on.

  6. 6

    Adjust the tax rate

    The preset is a planning figure. Replace it with your accountant's effective rate on profit, including social contributions, once you know it — the whole result scales with this number.

  7. 7

    Choose a profit buffer

    A second gross-up on top of tax, covering dry spells, bad debt and growth. Zero is a choice, not a default; 10 to 20 % is common for a freelancer with no salaried fallback.

  8. 8

    Read and export the rate card

    The grid gives hourly through annual figures and two project rates. Export copies a plain-text card to the clipboard, ready to paste into a proposal.

Specs & compatibility
CurrenciesUSD, GBP, EUR and DKK, set by the country preset and formatted with that country's own number conventions
Tax input range0 to under 100 % — 100 % or more is refused, because the gross-up would be undefined
Profit buffer0, 5, 10, 15, 20 or 25 %, applied after tax as a second gross-up
Weeks off0 to 51; 52 would leave no billable weeks
Rate card outputshourly, half-day (4 h), daily (8 h), weekly, monthly and annual, plus 10 h and 40 h project rates
Project discounts5 % on a 10-hour block, 10 % on a 40-hour block — fixed, illustrative conventions
Exportplain-text rate card copied to the clipboard
Offlineworks with no network once the page has loaded
  • Divide by (1 - tax rate) rather than subtracting the tax: grossing up is the single correction that separates a rate that works from one that quietly loses money every year.
  • The billable-hours field is where optimism does the most damage. If you have never tracked it, start at 25 hours a week for a full-time practice and revise upward only with evidence.
  • Sick days are invisible in this model until you put them in the weeks-off field — an employee is paid while ill and you are not.
  • Pension and health insurance belong in monthly expenses, not in the tax percentage, or you will double-count them when you refine the tax rate later.
  • A day rate of eight times the hourly rate assumes eight billable hours in that day; if a client day really means six productive hours plus travel, price it that way.
  • Volume discounts are a negotiating position, not a law of the market — the 5 % and 10 % figures here are a starting point, and a 40-hour block that displaces other work may deserve no discount at all.
  • Rerun the calculation whenever your expenses change materially. A new insurance policy or a software price rise moves the floor under your rate, and the floor is the number you should never negotiate below.
  • Country presets for the US, UK, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands
  • Correct tax gross-up rather than a subtraction
  • Statutory paid-leave defaults with the legal source named
  • Hourly, half-day, daily, weekly, monthly, annual and project rates
  • Annual breakdown showing salary, expenses, tax reserve and buffer
  • Clipboard rate-card export
  • Setting a first rate when leaving a salaried job, using the old salary as the take-home target.
  • Checking whether a client's proposed day rate clears your actual floor once tax and unbilled time are counted.
  • Repricing after a move abroad, where the currency, the tax position and the holiday norm all change at once.
  • Working out how much revenue a six-week parental break has to be funded by the remaining weeks.
  • Justifying a rate increase to a long-standing client with a written breakdown rather than an assertion.
  • Comparing a freelance offer against a permanent one on the same take-home basis.
Start from what you want to keep, not from what you want to charge. Add your annual business expenses to your take-home target to get the profit the business must produce. Divide that by one minus your effective tax rate — dividing, not subtracting, because tax comes off the top. Divide again by one minus any profit buffer. Then divide the result by the hours you can genuinely invoice in a year, which is your billable hours per week multiplied by the weeks you actually work. That last division is where most calculations go wrong: using 40 hours and 52 weeks produces a rate roughly 40 % too low for a typical practice.
Because a self-employed tax bill depends on facts a calculator cannot see: your total profit and therefore your bracket, whether you trade as a sole trader or a company, which reliefs and schemes you qualify for, your region in some countries, and your social-contribution position. The presets carry a rounded planning percentage — 30 % for the US and UK, 35 % for the Netherlands, 40 % for Germany, 42 % for Denmark — for income tax plus social contributions on a mid-range profit. The field stays editable and the whole result scales linearly with it, so replacing it with your accountant's figure is the single highest-value edit you can make.
No, and building it in is a common and expensive error. VAT — moms in Denmark, MwSt in Germany, BTW in the Netherlands — is added on top of your rate, collected from the client, and handed to the tax authority. It is never your income, so it must not appear in the calculation that determines what you need to earn. Quote your rate excluding VAT and add it on the invoice. The one place VAT genuinely affects your economics is cash flow, since you hold the money between collecting and remitting it, and that is a bank-balance question rather than a pricing one.
Far fewer than a 2,080-hour employment year, which is the point of separating the two fields here. Take 52 weeks, remove the weeks you take off — the preset uses the statutory employee entitlement for your country, from two weeks in the US to 5.6 in the UK — and multiply what is left by the hours you can invoice in a week. That weekly figure is the honest one: client work only, excluding sales calls, proposals, invoicing, bookkeeping, training and the revision you did not charge for. A full-time freelancer billing 30 hours a week for 46 weeks reaches about 1,380 billable hours, roughly two-thirds of an employment year.
Because they are US dollar figures and the page refuses to imply a comparison it cannot make honestly. Converting them would need a live exchange rate, which this tool does not fetch — it runs entirely offline — and even a correct conversion would compare US market rates against a European cost base, which is not a like-for-like judgement. So when the currency is anything other than USD the benchmark block is replaced by a note explaining exactly that, rather than showing a marker whose position would be meaningless.
It depends on how exposed you are. The buffer is a second gross-up covering the things the rest of the model treats as certainties but are not: a client who pays late or not at all, a quarter with no work, equipment that fails early, and the capital you need to grow rather than merely survive. A freelancer with a salaried partner and low fixed costs might reasonably run at 5 %. Someone carrying a mortgage on freelance income alone, in a field with lumpy demand, is closer to 20 or 25 %. Zero is defensible only if you already hold a substantial cash reserve, because without one the buffer is what the reserve would have been.

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