Most rate calculators divide your salary goal by 2,080 hours. That number is a fantasy — it assumes every working hour is billable and you never take a day off. This one uses the hours you really have.
This is where nearly everyone goes wrong. You don’t get paid to write proposals, chase invoices, do your books, or take a discovery call that goes nowhere. For most solo freelancers 50–60% of working time is billable. At 40 hours a week that’s 20–24 paid hours, not 40 — so your rate has to carry roughly twice the weight you assumed.
Holiday, illness, and the dead week where a client goes silent are all real. 46 weeks is a realistic default. Using 52 quietly inflates your available hours by 13% and understates your rate by the same amount.
Take-home is what’s left after tax and costs. Working backwards, gross revenue needs to be (take-home + costs) ÷ (1 − tax rate). Forgetting this is how a rate that looked fine in January fails to cover the bill in April.
Below this number you are paying for the privilege of working. Above it is where pricing actually starts — and price should reflect what the outcome is worth to the client, not what your costs are. Value pricing beats cost-plus every time. But you need the floor first, because it’s the number that tells you when to walk away.
Freelance OS turns Claude into your back office — proposals with three-option pricing, scopes that stop creep, invoicing with a real ledger, a markdown CRM, contract red-flag review. The version inside the pack reads your actual project history and pressure-tests each quote against it.
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