Freelance developer hourly rate calculator

Work out what to charge per hour of freelance development: from your living budget, hours sold, tax and margin. Estimates, calls and fixes count too. No sign-up.

Three mistakes that pull your income down

1. Estimates with no buffer. An eight-hour task almost always takes longer. With a fixed price, every extra hour lowers your real rate.

2. A free warranty. Fixes after handover with no time limit and no scope are unpaid work. Name the period and what it covers.

3. A rate based on a salary. A salary gets divided by 168 hours, but a freelancer sells fewer, pays their own tax and finds their own clients. How to convert it — see salary to hourly rate.

What eats a developer's hours

Code is only part of the work. Estimating, calls, setting up environments, reviews, deploys and emails take time too, but they don't always make it onto the invoice.

Then there are fixes after handover. If the contract doesn't name a warranty period, bugs on an old project turn into free work.

Enter in the calculator how much of that time there really is: the paid hours have to cover it too.

Working out your rate is half the job

The calculator tells you what to charge. The timer shows what you actually get: how many hours you worked today, how many of them are paid, and how much is left until your daily target.

A rate without tracked hours is a promise to yourself that nobody checks.

Five of your numbers, not someone else's median

Going by someone else's rate makes no sense: it's built from someone else's life — another city, another tax, another share of paid hours. Yours comes from five numbers, and all of them are about you.

Common questions

What's a freelance developer's rate?

As much as they sold hours at their rate, minus costs and tax. Two developers can differ several times over: because of hours, costs and clients. So it's more useful to work out your own rate than to look for someone else's. More in what others earn.

Hourly or per project?

It depends on how clear the scope is. How to choose and how to check a project price against your rate — see hourly or fixed price.

How do I estimate tasks without working for free?

Log the real hours for every task. After a few projects you'll see how far your estimates are off, and you can build that multiplier in from the start.

Which hours go into the calculator?

Only the ones that go on an invoice. Learning a new stack and side projects are an investment, not hours sold.

Why does the rate come out higher than in job ads?

An employer pays for holidays, sick leave, equipment and taxes, and finds the work. As a freelancer, all of that goes into your rate.

Rate, hours and projects in one place

A minute on how it works day to day.

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