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A 40-hour week is almost never 40 billable hours. Between sales calls, admin, email, time off, and the gaps between projects, the hours a client actually pays for are a fraction of the ones you work. This turns your real week into the number that matters: billable hours a year — and your true utilization.
Nothing you type leaves your browser. These are planning estimates — your real billable hours will vary week to week.
The single most expensive mistake in freelance pricing is assuming every working hour is a paid one. As an employee, the hours you spent in meetings, answering email, or waiting for the next task were all covered by your salary. Freelancing, only the hours you can put on an invoice generate income — and everything else, from chasing leads to bookkeeping, comes out of your own time. Add in the weeks you take off and the picture changes fast: a "full-time" freelancer often bills far less than half of a standard 2,080-hour year.
This calculator makes that gap visible. You give it three honest numbers — the hours you actually work in a week, the weeks you take off, and the hours each week that no client pays for — and it walks the arithmetic down to the figure that drives everything else:
That utilization rate — your billable hours as a share of a standard full-time year — is the number consultancies live and die by, and almost no solo freelancer tracks it. Most full-time freelancers land somewhere between 50% and 75%. If yours is lower, it isn't a failure; it's simply the reality your rate has to account for. The fewer hours you can bill, the more each one has to earn to fund the whole year.
Billable hours are the hidden input behind every rate calculation. Drop the figure from this tool into the Rate Calculator as your billable hours, and the rate it returns will be built on a number you can actually hit — not an optimistic guess. It also explains why two freelancers charging the same hourly rate can earn wildly different incomes: the one with higher utilization simply has more hours to sell. Raising your effective income often has less to do with raising your rate than with protecting the billable hours you already have.
A standard full-time year is 2,080 hours (40 hours × 52 weeks), but very few of those are billable. After subtracting time off and the unbillable hours every week — sales, admin, email, bookkeeping — most full-time freelancers can realistically bill somewhere between roughly 1,000 and 1,500 hours a year. This calculator gives you your own figure from your actual week.
Utilization is your billable hours as a share of a full-time year. Agencies often target 70–80% for staff, but solo freelancers — who do all their own sales, admin, and marketing — commonly run 50–75%. There's no universally "right" number; what matters is knowing yours and pricing so the billable hours cover the whole year, unbillable time included.
Anything a client doesn't pay for directly: finding and pitching work, writing proposals, invoicing and chasing payment, bookkeeping and taxes, email and admin, professional development, and the downtime between projects. It's real work that keeps the business running — it just doesn't go on an invoice, which is exactly why your billable rate has to cover it.
Directly. Your rate has to turn a limited number of billable hours into a full year's income. Use this tool to find your realistic billable hours, then enter that figure in the Rate Calculator — the rate it returns will be grounded in hours you can actually bill, rather than an optimistic full-time assumption.
No. Every calculation runs entirely in your browser — nothing you type is sent to a server or stored. The link in your address bar updates so you can bookmark or share a scenario, but it only contains the numbers you chose.
Keep going
Feed your billable hours in and get the hourly rate you actually need to charge.
See what a salary really equals as a freelance rate — and the reverse.
Check a project's true effective rate against your target before you say yes.