Invoice generatorFree, no sign-up — your invoice is saved in your browser, not in an account

Freelance rate calculator

Work backwards from what you need to earn to the rate that gets there — counting the hours you cannot bill, the costs of running the business, and what you put aside for tax.

What the year has to cover

What you want to end up with, before business costs and before anything set aside for tax.

Software, insurance, hardware, accounting, a desk somewhere — everything the work costs you before you are paid for it.

Whatever leaves again before it is yours: tax, pension, insurance, a quiet month. The rate is divided by what is left, not multiplied by this.

The hours you actually sell

Fifty-two minus holidays, minus the weeks you are ill.

All the hours you work, billable or not.

Round numbers to save typing, not a target to hit. Count a fortnight of your own calendar if you want the real one.

Only used to turn the hourly rate into a day rate.

For the invoice

Used only if you press Create this invoice, as the name of the line.

GuideSetting a freelance rateHow this works, and where the figures go wrong →

What this calculator does not do

  • It does not tell you what to charge. It answers one question — what rate reaches the target you typed — and the target is yours. Whether the market pays it is a different question, and not one arithmetic can answer.
  • It does not know your tax. The share you set aside is a number you supply, not a rate this page looked up, and it covers whatever you decide it covers.
  • It does not spread the year out. It assumes the work arrives evenly, which no freelance year does; the weekly and monthly figures are the year divided, not a forecast.
  • It does not keep anything. Nothing is written to your browser's storage while you use it and nothing is sent to us, so the figures are gone when you close the tab.

Related

To go the other way — the rate is already fixed and you want to know what a year holds at it — use the billable hours calculator, which starts from days off rather than working weeks. To turn this rate into an actual invoice with hours against it, the hourly invoice calculator takes blocks of hours and expenses. For what a client owes once the invoice is out, there is the invoice calculator. Pricing a thing rather than your time? The markup and margin calculator works between a cost and a price.

Last updated 21 September 2026