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A project's pay looks fine — until the scope creeps, the unbillable prep piles up, and the expenses come out of your end. This finds the rate a gig really pays per hour, then tells you to take it, negotiate, or walk.
Nothing you type leaves your browser. This isn't tax or legal advice — for your specific situation, talk to a professional.
The pay on a project proposal is a gross number, and freelancers say yes to it as if it were take-home. It isn't. The real question is never "is $4,000 a good price?" — it's "what does this gig pay me per hour I actually spend on it, after everything?" That's your true effective rate, and it's almost always lower than the sticker math suggests, because three things quietly eat it:
Here's the formula this calculator uses:
Scope creep is the silent killer of fixed-price work. You quote 40 hours; revisions, "one quick thing," and a stakeholder who wasn't in the kickoff turn it into 50. At a flat fee, every extra hour divides the same pay across more time — so your effective rate drops while you feel busier. Unbillable prep and admin are the hours the project costs you that never appear on an invoice: scoping, the contract, onboarding into their tools, the kickoff call, chasing the final payment. And project expenses — a subcontractor, a stock licence, travel — come straight off the top. Net pay, divided by the hours you'll genuinely sink in, is the only number that tells you whether to say yes.
Enter your target hourly rate — the floor you need to hit, which you can size with the freelance rate calculator — and this tool compares it to the gig's effective rate to give a verdict:
The "negotiate" band exists because most underpriced gigs aren't dead — they're a counter-offer away. Knowing the precise number you'd need ("this works at $5,570, not $4,000") turns a vague gut "this feels low" into a concrete ask a client can actually say yes to.
Look at your last few fixed-price projects: how many hours did they actually take versus what you quoted? That ratio is your real creep. If you've never tracked it, 20–40% is a sane starting range for most fixed-price client work — design and dev projects with lots of stakeholders skew higher. The honest move is to enter what happens, not what you wish happened.
Yes — they're some of the most underestimated hours in freelancing. A two-hour kickoff call, an hour scoping, time setting up in the client's tools, and chasing the invoice can easily be a full unbillable day per project. They don't show up on any invoice, but they're hours this gig takes from your week, so they belong in the denominator of your real rate.
Your target is the floor you need to earn per billable hour to fund your take-home, taxes, expenses, and time off. If you don't have a number yet, the Freelance Rate Calculator works it out from the income you actually want, then you bring that figure here as the bar each gig has to clear.
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 with your numbers so you can bookmark or share a scenario, but that link only contains the figures you chose.
Keep going
Set the target hourly rate this gig has to clear in the first place.
Turn a good client into recurring monthly income, priced right.
See what a salary really equals as a freelance rate — and back.