Billable hours in a year
The hours in a working year and the hours you can sell are different numbers. At 60% billable, 1,880 working hours leave 1,128 to sell, and the gap is usually larger than you'd guess.
Billable and non-billable hours
The hours you can bill are well under the hours you put in. Billable hours are the ones a client is charged for. Everything else is still work: quoting, invoicing, chasing the invoice, bookkeeping, tools breaking, the call that leads nowhere, the revision you do for free because it's easier than arguing. All of it has to be done, and none of it is charged for.
How the year is worked out
| A full year would hold | 52 weeks × days a week × hours a day |
|---|---|
| Lost to days off | (holiday + other days off) × hours a day |
| Left to work with | the first, minus the second |
| Billable | what is left × the share you can bill |
Say you work an 8-hour day, 5 days a week, and take 15 days of holiday and 10 other days off. That's 2,080 hours in the year, 200 of them gone to time off, and 1,880 left. At 60% billable, you have 1,128 hours to sell and 752 worked but not charged for (about 63 hours a month).
Two numbers that sound the same and are not
The billable share is a share of the time left after days off. That's the figure the calculator asks for. A share of the whole year, days off included, is always smaller. In the example above, 60% billable works out at about 54% of the year.
Terms sheets and agency dashboards use both, usually without saying which. I'd ask which one a figure means before you compare it with yours, because in that example the gap between them is 120 hours, 3 working weeks.
How this differs from the freelance rate calculator
The two run in opposite directions, so I recommend starting from the question you have. Setting a freelance rate works through the second one.
| Billable hours | Given your schedule and your rate, what does the year hold? |
|---|---|
| Freelance rate | Given what you need to earn, what must the rate be? |
I'd use the billable hours calculator when the rate is already set (by a contract, by the market, or by what you've always charged) and you want to know whether the year adds up. Use the freelance rate calculator when the target is fixed and the rate has to move.
Why the weekly figure looks low
The weekly figure is the year divided by 52, not by the weeks you work. The time off has already come out of the annual total, so dividing by anything less would take it out twice. For example, 22 billable hours a week is what 1,128 a year averages to across every week on the calendar, including the weeks you're away.
Short version: Take the year's working hours, less days off, times the share you can bill. The share applies to what's left after the days off, so 60% billable works out at about 54% of the whole year.
Last updated 22 September 2026