Freelancers often start pricing from the wrong end — picking an hourly rate that feels competitive, then hoping enough hours materialize to hit their income goal. This calculator works the problem the other way: tell it the income you want, the rate you charge, and how many weeks you plan to work, and it tells you exactly how many hours you need to bill — per year, per week, and per day — to get there.
How it works
The math is a straight division, run twice. Billable hours per year is your income target divided by your hourly rate — the total hours needed to generate that revenue at that price. Dividing that annual figure by your weeks worked gives billable hours per week, and dividing again by five gives billable hours per day, assuming a standard five-day work week. All three numbers are derived from the same unrounded annual-hours figure, so they stay internally consistent with each other even after each one is rounded to two decimal places.
Worked example
Say you want to earn $80,000 this year, you charge $75 an hour, and you plan to work 46 weeks — roughly 52 minus six weeks of holidays, vacation, and slow stretches between projects.
- Billable hours per year: $80,000 ÷ $75 = 1,066.67 hours
- Per week: 1,066.67 ÷ 46 = 23.19 hours
- Per day (5-day week): 1,066.67 ÷ 230 = 4.64 hours
Twenty-three hours a week sounds manageable next to a standard 40-hour work week. But that's 23 hours of client-billable work specifically — it doesn't include the time spent writing proposals, sending invoices, sitting on client calls, doing admin, or finding the next project. Push the hourly rate down to $60 with the same income target and the same weeks worked, and the per-week figure jumps to nearly 29 hours, which starts eating hard into the time left for everything else a freelance business needs.
How to interpret your result
Treat every number here as a target, not a guarantee — this is capacity math, not a forecast of what you'll actually earn. Most freelancers can't bill 100% of the hours they work; industry benchmarks put realistic billable utilization somewhere between 50% and 80% of total working time, with 60–75% being a common target for someone running a full freelance practice solo. If your per-week result already sits close to a standard 40-hour week, you're not looking at a comfortable number — you're looking at a rate or income target that needs adjusting, because there's no room left over for the unbillable work every freelance business requires.
The per-day figure is the fastest gut check. If it comes out above 6 or 7 hours, hitting your income target at this rate would mean billing nearly every working hour of every day, with nothing left for admin, marketing, or a bad week — which is a signal to raise your rate, not to try to out-work the math.
Methodology & sources
The formula is billableHoursPerYear = incomeTarget / hourlyRate; perWeek = billableHoursPerYear / weeksWorked; perDay = billableHoursPerYear / (weeksWorked × 5). All three figures are computed from the unrounded annual-hours value before rounding, the same unrounded-then-rounded approach used across these calculators so the year, week, and day numbers never drift apart from each other.
The income target here is gross revenue — the same pre-tax figure the IRS treats as subject to self-employment tax, a flat 15.3% on net earnings, per the IRS — so don't mistake the hours this calculator asks for as hours that fully convert to take-home pay. And because real freelance work always includes unbillable time, Harvest's breakdown of billable utilization rate is a useful reference for what a sustainable share of billable hours actually looks like in practice.