Work out the minimum hourly and day rate that covers the take-home pay you want, your yearly business costs and tax, using only the hours you can actually bill. The math runs in your browser. Nothing you enter is stored or sent anywhere.
Start from the money you want to keep after tax, not from a salary advert or a competitor's rate. Divide that take-home goal by one minus your combined tax rate so you know the profit you must earn before tax. Then add yearly business expenses — software, insurance, equipment, accounting, a workspace, professional memberships. Expenses are treated as deductible here, so they are added on top rather than grossed up for tax. That sum is the revenue you need to invoice in a year.
Divide that revenue only by billable hours. A common mistake is to use 2,080 hours, which is 40 hours a week with no time off and no unpaid work. Freelancers also spend time on proposals, invoicing, admin and quiet weeks. Twenty to thirty billable hours in a working week is a more typical planning range, and weeks off should be subtracted from 52 first. The calculator uses (take-home ÷ (1 − tax rate) + expenses) ÷ ((52 − weeks off) × billable hours per week). The day rate multiplies that hourly figure by the hours you treat as a billed day.
Treat the result as a floor, not a quote. You might charge more when the work is specialized or the timeline is tight, and you might still lose money on a job if unpaid revisions eat the hours you planned. Check a finished flat-fee job with the effective hourly rate calculator, and compare a fixed fee with hourly billing in the flat fee vs hourly calculator.
The default example — $80,000 take-home, $12,000 expenses, 25% tax, 4 weeks off, 25 billable hours a week — needs $118,666.67 of revenue across 1,200 billable hours, which is $98.89 an hour or $791.11 a day.
The Rate Floor spreadsheet is a $12 one-time download. It is a quote builder with a flat-fee overrun check, so you can set a floor and see whether a fixed price still covers the hours as a job runs long.
Get the Rate Floor spreadsheet ($12)
It grosses up your after-tax take-home goal for the tax rate you enter, adds deductible business expenses, and divides that revenue target by billable hours in the year: (weeks in the year minus weeks off) times billable hours per week. The day rate is the hourly rate times the hours in a billed day.
No. Only count hours you can invoice. Sales, admin, bookkeeping and unpaid revisions do not go in the divisor. Using 2,080 hours (40 hours times 52 weeks) almost always understates the rate you need.
No. It is a floor based on the income, costs, tax rate and hours you type in. Market rates, the value of the work and what a given client will pay are separate questions.