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More and more freelance work — consulting, design sprints, video shoots, contract dev — is quoted by the day, not the hour. This converts cleanly between the two (and shows the week, month, and yearly picture), so a client asking for your "day rate" never catches you guessing.
Nothing you type leaves your browser. This isn't financial advice — it's a quick way to keep your rate consistent across hourly, daily, and yearly.
A day rate is not a mystery number — it's just your hourly rate multiplied by the hours in a billable day. The trap is the word billable. A working day might be eight or nine hours at the desk, but only some of those hours are client work you can actually invoice; the rest go to email, calls, proposals, and admin. So the honest conversion uses billable hours, not clock hours:
That last line is where a day rate gets useful for planning. Multiply it out across the days you actually work in a year — your working weeks times your billable days per week — and you get the revenue the rate produces if you stay fully booked. Drop the billable hours per day from eight to six and watch your day rate climb: that's not a trick, it's an honest admission that you can't sell every hour you're awake, and your rate has to make up the difference.
Clients often expect a "bulk discount" for booking a whole day, but think carefully before giving one. A booked day is a day you can't sell to anyone else, and a day rate already removes the friction of tracking every fifteen minutes — that convenience has value to them. Most experienced freelancers price a day at the full hourly rate times billable hours, and reserve any discount for genuine multi-day or multi-week commitments. A half day, meanwhile, is rarely worth exactly 50%: it still burns a context-switch and often blocks the rest of the day, so charging 55–65% of a full day is common and defensible.
Fewer than the hours you're at your desk. After meetings, email, invoicing, and sales, most freelancers can genuinely bill six to seven hours of a full working day — not eight or nine. Using a realistic billable figure keeps your day rate honest: if you base it on eight billable hours you'll never actually deliver, you're quietly underpricing every day you sell.
Rarely exactly half. A half-day booking still costs you a context switch and often makes the other half of the day hard to sell, so many freelancers charge 55–65% of their full day rate rather than a clean 50%. This calculator shows the straight 50% figure as a floor — adjust upward to reflect the real cost of a fragmented day.
Because you don't bill during the weeks you take off. If you work 46 weeks and rest 6, your annual billings come only from those 46 weeks of billable days — so the calculator multiplies your day rate by working weeks times billable days per week. Counting all 52 weeks would overstate what a day rate actually earns you in a real year.
It depends on the work. Day rates suit focused, full-day engagements — workshops, shoots, sprints — where tracking the minutes is awkward and a clean daily number is easier for everyone. Hourly suits smaller, fragmented tasks. Many freelancers quote a day rate to clients but keep an hourly rate underneath it as the floor, which is exactly what this tool keeps in sync.
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 and mode you chose.
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Work backward from the take-home you want to the hourly rate you should charge.
See how many hours you can really bill in a year — and your true utilization.
Pick the income you want and see how much work it takes to get there.