EarnBunny / Hourly rate calculator
Tool · nothing is stored
Hourly rate calculator
Work out the lowest hourly rate that actually covers your life. It accounts for the hours you cannot bill, the weeks you take off, your business costs and the tax you need to set aside — which is why the answer is usually higher than people expect.
What you need to actually keep, after tax and business costs. Start with what your life costs, not what you used to earn.
Holiday, sickness and the quiet weeks between projects. Six is realistic. Two is a plan for burning out.
Hours a client pays for — not hours worked. Admin, pitching, invoicing and email are not billable. Most full-time freelancers land between 20 and 25.
Software, equipment, insurance, accounting, a desk somewhere. Add it up once a year and be honest.
The share of profit you put away for tax and any self-employment contributions. Rates differ by country — check yours rather than trusting this default.
Your minimum rate
per billable hour
Why the number looks high
A salary hides a lot. Paid holiday, sick days, employer pension contributions, the laptop, the software licences, the accountant, the fifteen hours a week nobody bills for. When you work for yourself, all of that comes out of your rate.
The most common mistake we see is dividing an old salary by 2,080 hours. If you were on $60,000, that gives about $29 an hour. Run the same $60,000 through this calculator with realistic inputs and the answer lands closer to $75. The gap is not greed. It is the cost of everything an employer used to absorb.
This is a floor, not a price
What comes out of this calculator is the point below which the work costs you money. It is not what you should quote. Your quote depends on what the work is worth to the client, how quickly you can do it, how much competition there is, and how much you want the job.
Use the floor to make decisions, not to make offers. When a project comes in below it, you now know exactly what you are choosing to lose.
A note on billable hours
If you have never tracked this, log a normal week before you trust your guess. Almost everybody overestimates. The gap between 30 assumed billable hours and 22 real ones is a 36% difference in the rate you need.
What to do with the answer
- Compare it to the ledger. If your floor sits above the median in your category, you either need a narrower speciality, better clients, or fewer unbillable hours.
- Recalculate every six months. Costs drift upward quietly, and so does the amount of unbilled work.
- Then read the pricing work. Setting the number is the easy half; saying it out loud is the part people struggle with.
Nothing you type here is sent anywhere or saved. The whole calculation runs in your browser.
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