How to set your freelance hourly rate: a formula you can check against your own numbers

Sébastien Leroux — Wed, 28 Oct 2026 08:12:10 +0000

Most freelancers set their rate by looking at what others charge. That tells you what the market tolerates, not whether the rate keeps you in business. A better start is a floor: the lowest rate at which you still earn what you need. Here is the formula and a worked example.

The formula

Minimum hourly rate = (target net income + business costs + taxes) / billable hours

Each part is easy to underestimate.

Target net income: what you want to take home in a year, after everything.
Business costs: software, equipment, insurance, accounting, coworking, training. Add them up for a full year.
Taxes and social contributions: as self-employed you pay them yourself, so include them in the total you need to cover.
Billable hours: not 40 per week. Sales, emails, invoicing, unpaid revisions, holidays and sick days all cut into it. Many freelancers bill 20 to 30 hours a week over 44 to 46 working weeks.

A worked example

Say you want 50,000 net. Costs add 8,000 and taxes add 12,000, so you need to bring in 70,000.

You work 45 weeks and bill 22 hours a week, which is 990 billable hours.

70,000 / 990 = about 71 per hour. That is your floor, not your price. Anything below it means you pay to work.

Check the result against a real project

Rates are easy to misjudge, projects are not. If you quote a fixed price of 3,000 and the job takes 60 hours, you earned 50 per hour. Compare that number with your floor, not with the price you quoted.

Day rate and salary comparisons

Two conversions come up all the time:

Hourly to day rate: multiply by the hours you can really bill in a day (often 5 to 6), not by 8.
Salary to freelance rate: do not just divide a salary by 2,080 hours. Add the costs an employer used to cover, and divide by billable hours instead.

Three habits that protect your rate

Track your time for one month to find your real billable ratio.
Raise rates for new clients first. Existing clients are harder to move.
Revisit the floor every year, because costs and taxes change.

Run it with your own numbers

I work on KIWI, and we published free calculators for exactly these steps. No signup is needed:

If your numbers differ from the example, I would like to hear which part felt off: the billable hours, the tax estimate or the costs.

Hello Dev 👋

Sébastien Leroux — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:05:43 +0000

Hey Dev community 👋

I'm Sébastien, based in Geneva 🇨🇭, and I've been shipping web apps for 20 years. Figured it was finally time to stop lurking and start writing here.

What I do

nammu.ch — my web dev agency. Two decades of React, Node, MySQL, and more recently Laravel/Filament. Clients across Switzerland, mostly custom apps and bespoke CMS work.

Kiwi — an AI-powered platform for freelancers. Think CRM + invoicing + AI agents that actually do work for you (not just chat). Currently in closed beta, V1 launching soon.

Aukimi — a browser-based creative suite. 12 professional tools (image editing, 3D, pixel art, vector, and more) running fully in the browser. Inkwell is already open; the rest is rolling out of beta.

What I'll write about

Building two SaaS while running an agency (spoiler: it's chaos)
WebGPU, Three.js, Babylon.js — the good, the bad, the compiler errors
Real talk about React/Node architecture at scale
Marketing and distribution as a solo technical founder
Occasional rants about DNS, DKIM, and why emails still break in 2026

Excited to meet other builders here. If you're working on SaaS, creative tools, or just love shipping things, say hi 👋

Sébastien

DEV Community: Sébastien Leroux