Ladabo

Hourly Rate Calculator

What to charge as a freelancer once the unpaid parts are counted.

€

What you want left for yourself, before personal income tax.

€

Accountant, insurance, software, equipment, phone, travel, training.

weeks

52 minus holiday, illness and public holidays. Most people land near 45.

days
hours
%

The rest goes on admin, quoting, invoicing, marketing and unpaid meetings.

Results update as you type. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Charge per hour —
Charge per day —
Billable hours a year —
Revenue you must invoice —
What a naive sum would say — Target divided by 52 × hours. This is the trap.

How this is worked out

The sum most people do is target income divided by 52 weeks of full-time hours. It produces a number that is roughly half what they need, and it is the single most common reason freelancers work constantly and earn badly.

Three things eat the difference:

Weeks you do not work. Holiday, illness, public holidays. Nobody pays you for these once you are self-employed. Forty-six working weeks is realistic; fifty-two is fantasy.

Hours you cannot bill. Quoting, invoicing, chasing payment, marketing, bookkeeping, unpaid calls with prospects who never buy. Seventy per cent billable is a good year for most freelancers. Some trades are much lower.

Business costs. Your accountant, insurance, software, laptop, phone, training. This money passes through you and leaves — it is not income.

So the calculation runs backwards from what you need:

billable hours = weeks × days × hours × billable share
rate = (target income + business costs) ÷ billable hours

A worked example

You want 60,000 a year, have 6,000 of business costs, work 46 weeks, five days, eight hours, and can bill 70% of your time:

  • Hours worked: 46 × 5 × 8 = 1,840
  • Hours you can actually bill: 1,288
  • Revenue needed: 66,000
  • Charge about 51 an hour, or 410 a day

Now the naive sum: 60,000 ÷ (52 × 40) = 29 an hour.

Charging 29 leaves you working the same year and earning roughly 37,000 before tax instead of 60,000. The rate is not "high" — it is what the number has to be for the arithmetic to close.

This is also the honest comparison against a salary. A 60,000 salaried job includes paid holiday, sick pay, employer pension contributions and a laptop. Matching it as a freelancer takes a good deal more than 60,000 of invoices.

What this doesn't cover

  • The target is before personal income tax and social contributions. What you keep depends on where you live and how you are set up.
  • It assumes you can actually sell all your billable hours. In a quiet year you cannot, which is an argument for the rate being higher rather than lower.
  • Fixed-price work is not exempt from this. Estimate the hours, apply the rate, then decide whether the fixed price is worth it.
  • Very high or very low billable shares distort the result. If yours is below about 40%, the bigger problem is probably the unbillable work, not the rate.

Common questions

My rate looks too high to sell. What now?

Something has to move, and it is worth being deliberate about which. Raise the billable share by cutting admin. Lower the business costs. Accept a smaller target for a year. Or accept the rate and sell fewer, better clients. What does not work is quietly charging less and hoping volume fixes it — that is how freelancers end up busy and broke.

Should I charge by the hour or by the day?

Day rates are more common for longer engagements and easier for clients to budget. The arithmetic is the same either way — the day rate here is just the hourly rate times your working day. Whichever you quote, work it out from this calculation rather than from what feels askable.

What billable percentage is realistic?

Most established freelancers land somewhere between 60% and 75%. Below 50% usually means either heavy sales effort or a lot of unpaid scoping. Track it for a month before trusting a guess — people almost always overestimate it.

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