What you want to keep after taxes, per year
Self-employment + income tax (US self-employed: ~25–30%)
Software, equipment, insurance
Days you won’t work or bill clients
Admin, sales, and marketing you can’t bill to clients
Advanced options
Health insurance, retirement contributions, etc.
Reserve for slow periods or unpaid invoices
52 weeks × 5 days
Enter your numbers to see your day rate
What is a day rate?
A day rate is the flat fee you charge a client for one day of work — and for freelancers, setting it badly is a fast way to lose money. The common shortcut, dividing your target income by the number of working days in a year, produces a number that looks fair and quietly underpays you. It ignores the two things that hit independent workers hardest: taxes you pay yourself, and the days you cannot bill at all.
No freelancer bills 260 days a year. Vacation, holidays, and sick days come off the top. So does non-billable time — the admin, sales, and marketing that keeps the business running but never lands on an invoice. On top of that, you owe self-employment tax that a salaried employee never sees. This calculator works backwards from what you actually want to keep, then adds the tax, expenses, and lost days back in to show the rate that gets you there.
For example, if you want $60,000 in your pocket after a 25% tax rate, take 30 days off, and lose 25% of the rest to non-billable work, you have about 173 billable days and need roughly $80,000 in revenue — a day rate of about $464, not the $231 a naive income split would suggest.
How to use this calculator
Pick your mode. Use Freelancer mode to find what you should charge per day. Switch to Client mode to budget what a contractor at a known day rate will cost over a set number of days.
Enter your take-home goal and tax rate. Put in the income you want to keep after taxes, then the combined self-employment and income tax rate you pay — US freelancers usually land around 25 to 30 percent.
Set your days off and non-billable time. Add up your vacation, holidays, and sick days, then estimate the share of working time that goes to admin and sales. Most freelancers bill only 60 to 75 percent of their time.
Read the breakdown. The stacked bar shows where your yearly billings go — take-home, tax, expenses, and buffer — so you can see exactly why your rate has to be what it is. If you would rather price by the hour, our Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator runs the same math per hour.