Billable hours in a year

Billable and non-billable hours

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 nothing because it is easier than arguing. None of it is optional and none of it is charged for, which is why the share you can bill is well under the hours you put in.

How the year is worked out

An eight-hour day, five days a week, fifteen days of holiday and ten other days off: 2,080 hours in the year, 200 of them gone to time off, 1,880 left. At sixty per cent billable that is 1,128 hours to sell and 752 worked but not charged for — about ninety-four hours a month.

Two numbers that sound the same and are not

The billable share the calculator asks for is a share of the time left after the days off. The other figure, the share of the whole year including them, is always the smaller one: sixty per cent billable on that example works out at about 54 per cent of the year. Terms sheets and agency dashboards use both, usually without saying which, and the gap between them is a fortnight.

How this differs from the freelance rate calculator

They run in opposite directions and it is worth knowing which question you have. Setting a freelance rate works through the second one.

Use this one when the rate is already set — by a contract, by the market, by what you have always charged — and you want to know whether the year adds up. Use the freelance rate calculator when the target is the fixed thing and the rate is what has to move.

Why the weekly figure looks low

It is the year divided by 52, not by the weeks you actually work. The time off has already come out of the annual total, so dividing by anything less would take it out twice. Twenty-two billable hours a week is what 1,128 a year averages to across every week on the calendar, including the ones you spend somewhere else.