Calculate your real take-home pay after invisible business costs.
Freelancers and contractors often think in day rates or annual income, but the real question is what you earn per billable hour after expenses are deducted. Enter your income, costs, billable hours per week, and weeks worked per year to find your true rate.
Enter your gross annual income, your estimated annual business expenses, how many hours per week you bill clients, and how many weeks per year you work. Your true hourly rate updates instantly.
Annual salary, monthly income, or project revenue can look clear until you compare them against the hours actually required to earn them. That is where hourly thinking becomes useful. It turns a large income figure into something you can compare across jobs, clients, schedules, and workloads.
This tool helps answer a more practical question than “what do I earn?” It helps answer “what does my time return once the hours are included?”
A higher salary is not automatically a better deal if the expected hours rise with it.
An hourly baseline helps you see whether a quote is merely busy or actually sustainable.
If a role starts consuming more hours than the contract suggests, the effective hourly value can fall without the salary changing at all.
The calculation itself is simple. The judgment around the inputs is where the value sits.
Gross pay, expected hours, real hours, paid leave, unpaid gaps, admin time, and non-billable work all change the result. That is why the “right” hourly rate is often not the first number people reach for, but the one they get after being honest about time.
A “40-hour job” that consistently takes 47 hours should usually be assessed as 47.
Freelance income has to absorb downtime, admin, software, insurance, and other overhead that a salary often hides.
If one option is being judged on gross income and another on after-tax money, the comparison is already distorted.
One role may pay more overall, but once the extra hours are included the effective rate may be worse.
If you are moving from employment to contract work, the employee-equivalent hourly figure is often only the starting point, not the final quote.
If a role keeps stretching evenings or weekends, recalculating the hourly return can make the tradeoff clearer.
This tool converts income and time into a rate. It does not calculate taxes, price overhead for you automatically, or tell you what you should accept in market or career terms. It gives you a clearer unit of comparison, not the final decision.
Hourly rate is one of the cleanest ways to stop large income numbers from masking weak time economics. It is not the only metric that matters, but it is a strong one whenever the real question is whether the time commitment is worth it.
The calculation deducts expenses and divides by actual billable hours. Fewer billable weeks (holidays, sick days, admin time) raise the true cost of each hour you sell.
Software subscriptions, equipment, insurance, accountancy fees, training, office costs, marketing — anything you spend to run your business.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type or paste is sent to any server — all processing happens locally on your device.