Freelance Rate and Pricing Calculators

Day Rate, Hourly Rate, Retainer and Meeting Cost Calculators for Agencies

What do I have to charge for this to work? Every tool here starts from that question and shows the working: a day rate built from the income you need and the days you can bill, a blended rate across a team, what an hour really costs once overheads are in, and how to structure surcharges, retainers and milestone payments.

Every Rates & Pricing tool

Blended Rate Calculator

One weighted hourly rate across a mixed team of roles.

Freelance Time-Off Surcharge

The rate uplift that pays for your unpaid time off.

Meeting Cost Ticker

Watch what a meeting costs while it is happening.

Milestone Payment Splitter

Split a project fee into deposit and milestone amounts.

Overhead Rate Calculator

Annual overhead spread across the hours you can actually bill.

Retainer Overage Calculator

What to invoice when a retainer runs over its included hours.

Starting from what you need, not what others charge

The freelance rate calculator works backwards. You enter the annual income you want, the costs of running the business, the holiday and sick days you will take, and the share of your time that is honestly billable — then it gives you the day and hour rate that gets you there. Most people are surprised by the billable share: once sales, admin, invoicing and learning are counted, 60% is a good year, and a rate set assuming 100% is a rate that guarantees a shortfall.

Utilisation and overhead

The billable utilisation calculator makes that share explicit: hours worked against hours invoiced, over a week, month or year. The business overhead rate calculator goes the other way and spreads fixed costs — software, insurance, workspace, equipment — over billable hours so you know the floor below which a job loses money before you have paid yourself anything.

Teams and blended rates

When several people at different rates work on one job, the client usually wants a single number. The blended rate calculator weights each person's rate by their share of the hours and gives the average, so a fixed-price quote can be checked against the real cost of the people delivering it.

Structuring the price

Vacation surcharge spreads the cost of unpaid holiday across the rate. Value-based pricing frames a fee against the outcome the client gets rather than the hours it takes. The retainer overage calculator sets a monthly block of hours and shows what happens above it. Milestone payments split a project fee into staged invoices tied to deliverables, with the deposit and balance shown clearly. And the meeting cost calculator does the sobering arithmetic of what a room full of people at their hourly rates actually costs — useful for deciding whether the meeting needs to happen.

Your figures stay with you

Rates, income targets and overheads are commercially sensitive. Nothing entered on these pages is sent to a server; the calculations run in your browser and disappear when you close the tab.