What Should You
Charge?

The most common freelance pricing mistake is taking an old salary, dividing by 2,080 hours, and calling that an hourly rate. This drastically undercharges, because it ignores everything an employer used to provide and everything you now lose to unpaid time. A £50,000 salary is not £24/hour as a freelancer — it's closer to £50–60/hour just to stand still.

The honest way to price is to work backwards from the life you want. Start with the income you genuinely need to take home. Add every business cost — software, equipment, insurance, accounting, marketing. Account for tax. Then divide not by the hours you work, but by the hours you can actually bill. That last number is the one freelancers consistently overestimate.

Here's the uncomfortable truth about billable hours: even a busy, established freelancer rarely bills more than 60–70% of their working time. The rest disappears into finding clients, writing proposals, invoicing, bookkeeping, learning, and the unavoidable gaps between projects. If you work 35 hours a week but only 23 are billable, your rate must be built on those 23 hours — or you will work constantly and still fall short.

This calculator does that maths the right way round. It takes your target income, adds your costs and tax, then divides by your real billable hours after holidays and non-billable time. The number it produces is your floor, not your ceiling — the minimum you need to charge to reach your goal. Many freelancers, seeing the honest figure for the first time, finally understand why they felt busy but broke. Charge below this and the shortfall comes out of your own income, every single hour.