Free tool 01 Pricing
Calculate your exact day rate floor from your real billable days — not 260.
9 inputs, 90 seconds → your day rate floor, market comparison, and retainer prices.
You probably do not know if you are charging enough — most freelancers guess, then hope.
90 seconds · no signup · nothing leaves your browser
- Calculate the exact day rate that covers your income, costs, tax and buffer.
- Compare your floor against 2026 market rate bands for your role and experience.
- Reveal the annual shortfall if your current rate sits below your floor.
- Price retainers and fixed-scope projects off your floor, with a built-in overage rate.
- Stress-test your rate against a slower year — fewer billable days, more time off.
Your day rate floor
$0 an hour · 0 billable days a year
The gap
What the current rate costs you
Retainers
What a committed block of days is worth
Priced at your floor, discounted 10% for the certainty a commitment buys. Cap the days. Bill overage at — a day, or the retainer becomes a free option on your calendar.
| Committed | Per month | Per year |
|---|
Projects
What a fixed-scope project must clear
The minimum a project can be priced at without borrowing from a future month. If a scope will not fit inside these days, the price is wrong — not the estimate.
| Scope | Floor price | With 15% risk margin |
|---|
Stress test
What happens when the year does not go to plan
Every one of these is a normal year, not a disaster. If your rate only works in the good version, it is not a floor.
Methodology
How this calculator works
Published in full so you can check it, argue with it, or quote it. Every number below is derived from your inputs — nothing is hard-coded except the tax tables and the market bands.
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1
Solve backwards from take-home pay
Rate calculators usually start at revenue. That is the wrong end. This one takes your target take-home figure and searches for the annual business profit that leaves exactly that much after tax, using a bisection over the real bracket tables. For the US that is 15.3% self-employment tax on 92.35% of net earnings (Social Security capped at the $184,500 wage base, Medicare uncapped, plus the 0.9% additional Medicare surtax over $200,000), a simplified 20% QBI deduction, the standard deduction, federal brackets, and an optional flat state rate. For the UK it is income tax with the personal allowance tapered above £100,000, plus Class 4 National Insurance at 6% and 2%.
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2
Add costs after tax, not before
Business costs are deductible, so they sit outside the profit figure that tax is calculated on. Adding them before tax — which several popular calculators do — inflates the required rate by taxing money you never earned.
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3
Divide by billable days, not working days
Working days are
(52 − weeks off) × days per week. Billable days are that number multiplied by your billable ratio. At five days a week, seven weeks off and a 60% billable ratio, a year contains 225 working days and 135 sellable ones. Dividing by 225 instead of 135 understates the required rate by 40%. That single substitution is the most common pricing error in independent consulting. -
4
Check the answer against the market
A floor is a constraint, not a price. The band comparison places your computed rate against published 2026 rate surveys for your role and experience level. If your floor lands above the band, the problem is usually capacity or costs, not ambition. If it lands well below, you are leaving money on the table and the market will not tell you.
Benchmark sources
- Utilisation and billable-hour norms — Harvest utilisation rate guidance for freelancers; MinuteDock billable vs non-billable analysis. Healthy range 60–80%.
- US day-rate bands — AWAI 2026 copywriter rate survey; Clockify average hourly rates 2026; Jobbers Global Freelance Hourly Rate Index 2026. Converted at 7.5 billable hours a day.
- UK day-rate bands — CalcKit UK freelance day rate guide 2026; typical 180–220 billable days a year.
- Retainer structure — 10–15% commitment discount and 1.25–1.5× overage rate, per GigRadar 2026 retainer pricing analysis.
- US tax figures — 2026 self-employment tax rates and the $184,500 Social Security wage base.
- UK tax figures — 2026/27 income tax bands and Class 4 National Insurance rates, England, Wales and Northern Ireland.
This is an estimate for planning, not tax advice. It assumes a sole trader or single-member LLC on default filing settings, no employees, no pension contributions, and no dividend or salary split. A limited company or S-corp election changes the arithmetic materially. Ask an accountant before you file anything.
Questions people ask before they set a rate
How much should I charge as a freelance copywriter?
Published 2026 surveys put freelance copywriters at roughly $375–$640 a day at 0–2 years, $640–$1,200 at 3–7 years, and $1,200–$2,250 for senior and specialist work. Direct-response specialism carries roughly a 60% premium; technical copy around 45%. Those are market bands, not your number. Your number is whichever is higher: the band, or the rate that covers your take-home target across the days you can actually bill.
Why is a freelance rate so much higher than the equivalent salary?
Because an employee is paid for roughly 260 days and a freelancer sells roughly 135. An employer also covers payroll taxes, pension, holiday, sick pay, equipment, software, insurance and training. A freelancer pays all of that out of the same revenue, across half the billable days. The rule of thumb — charge two to three times the equivalent employed hourly rate — is not a markup. It is what the arithmetic produces.
What percentage of my time will actually be billable?
Between 50% and 70% for most independents. Harvest puts the healthy target at 60–80% and notes that sustained utilisation under 60% signals a profitability problem while over 80% signals burnout risk. New freelancers typically bill 15–20 hours a week because business development eats the rest; established freelancers on retainers reach 30–35. Track it for one month before you trust your own estimate — almost everyone guesses high.
How should I price a monthly retainer?
Day rate × committed days per month, discounted 10–15%, with a hard cap and an overage rate of 1.25–1.5× base. The discount is what you charge less for predictable cash flow. The cap is what stops the retainer becoming a free option on your calendar. A retainer without a cap is not a pricing model, it is an unpriced liability — and it is the single most common way independents quietly slide under their own floor.
My floor is higher than what the market pays. Now what?
Then one of four things is true, and only one of them is about the market. Your costs are too high, your billable ratio is too low, your take-home target assumes a lifestyle the business cannot yet fund, or you are selling days when you should be selling outcomes. Fix capacity first — a billable ratio moving from 50% to 65% cuts the required rate by about 23% without changing anything a client sees.
Common follow-ups
Does anything I type here get sent anywhere?
No. The calculator is a single JavaScript file running in your browser. There is no server call, no analytics event carrying your numbers, no account, and no storage. If you copy the result link, your inputs are encoded in the URL — so treat that link the way you would treat the numbers themselves.
I trade through a limited company or an S-corp. Is this still useful?
The capacity half is exactly as useful — billable days do not care about your legal structure. The tax half will overstate your bill, because a salary-plus-dividend split or a reasonable-salary S-corp election reduces the self-employment charge. Use the flat-rate mode with your accountant's effective rate from last year.
Isn't day-rate pricing the wrong model anyway?
Often, yes — value-based pricing beats time-based pricing when you can measure the outcome. But a floor is not a pricing model. It is the line beneath which any model loses money. You still need to know how many days a piece of value-priced work will consume, and what those days cost you, or you cannot tell a good deal from a flattering one.
Where do the market bands come from, and how current are they?
They are consolidated from 2026 published rate surveys — AWAI for copywriting, Clockify and the Jobbers Global Freelance Hourly Rate Index for general freelance rates, and CalcKit for UK day rates — converted to day rates at 7.5 billable hours. Bands are shown in USD and GBP only. Other currencies read the USD band, which is indicative rather than local, and the tool says so on screen.
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