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Free Freelance Rate Calculator: What Should You Actually Charge?

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Checked by TNT Review — 5 October 2026. The spreadsheet’s formulas were verified by independently recalculating the same chain in a separate script and confirming the numbers match; it was not opened in a live spreadsheet application as part of this check, so treat it as logic-verified, not click-tested end to end.

The problem

“What should I charge?” is the question almost every new freelancer asks, and the honest answer is “it depends on costs and hours you probably haven’t written down yet.” Picking a number that feels reasonable, without doing this arithmetic first, is how people end up working full-time hours for part-time income.

Expected outcome

By the end of this guide you will have your own minimum hourly rate — the floor below which you are guaranteed to fall short of your own income goal — calculated from your real numbers, not a guess.

Requirements and costs

  • Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice Calc (all have free tiers or are free outright) to open the download.
  • Your own numbers: a rough annual income goal, expected unpaid time off, and any recurring business costs.
  • Cost: free.

Unfamiliar terms, explained

  • Billable hours — hours you can actually charge a client for, as opposed to hours spent on admin, marketing, invoicing or finding the next client, none of which a client pays for directly.
  • Minimum hourly rate — the lowest rate that still reaches your income goal given your real billable hours. It is a floor, not a target to charge exactly.

Step-by-step implementation

  1. Download the calculator below and open it in Excel, Google Sheets, or LibreOffice Calc.
  2. Fill in the five highlighted cells on the “Rate Calculator” sheet: your desired annual take-home income, weeks of unpaid time off per year, hours you work per week, the percentage of that time that goes to unpaid admin/marketing, and any annual business costs (software, insurance, a laptop fund, and so on).
  3. Read the four calculated rows below them, which update automatically: working weeks per year, billable hours per week and per year, required revenue, and your minimum hourly rate.
  4. Compare that number against what others in your field actually charge (check job boards or ask in a relevant community) and use whichever is higher — this calculator tells you your floor, not the market rate.

A real example

With a A$60,000 income goal, 4 weeks of unpaid time off, a 40-hour work week, 25% of that week spent on unpaid admin, and A$2,000 in annual costs:

Working weeks per year:     52 - 4 = 48
Billable hours per week:    40 x (1 - 0.25) = 30
Billable hours per year:    30 x 48 = 1,440
Required revenue:           A$60,000 + A$2,000 = A$62,000
Minimum hourly rate:        A$62,000 / 1,440 = A$43.06

Notice how much of the gap between “A$60,000 a year” and the final rate comes from the 25% admin time, not from the hourly math itself — that’s the number most new freelancers underestimate.

Common problems and fixes

  • The rate feels impossibly high compared to what others charge. That usually means your real admin/marketing time is higher than you estimated, not that the formula is wrong — try raising the admin percentage to something closer to your actual week and recheck.
  • You genuinely can’t charge that much in your market yet. Then something else has to move: lower the income goal, reduce costs, or increase billable hours — the calculator won’t tell you which is right for you, only what the trade-off looks like.
  • The formulas don’t recalculate. Check that your spreadsheet application has automatic calculation turned on (it’s the default in Excel, Sheets and Calc; it’s rarely turned off by accident).

Free vs. paid

This calculator is free and complete. Paid freelance-business tools add invoicing, time tracking and client management on top of this same core math — genuinely useful once you have repeat clients, but not necessary just to work out what to charge.

What to do next

Revisit this calculation every time a major cost or your available hours change, not just once at the start — a rate that made sense a year ago may not reflect your actual costs today.

Free resources

The download is the calculator itself, with a Read Me sheet explaining each cell.

Download the freelance rate calculator (ZIP, 7 KB)

Is there a paid version?

Not yet. This is the complete method. TNT Review has sold nothing to date and has no checkout, so any price we discuss in future should be read as a hypothesis, not an offer.

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