By Andrew James Flores, Nathan Management · Updated September 23, 2026 · Editorial Standards
These ten guides help you decide what to charge, how to structure the price, how much to set aside for federal taxes, and how to get paid on time. The pricing guides start from the same budget formula as the calculator, so a floor you work out in one guide can be carried into the next.
Andrew prices and invoices his own service work and built the calculator to replace guesswork with a formula. The guides cover the decisions around that formula: which hours count, which costs belong in the budget, which pricing model fits the job, and what happens to the money after the invoice goes out.
The calculator opens with these starting values: a personal income goal of $75,000 before taxes, $5,000 a year in business operating costs, no separate benefits budget, 25 billable hours per working week, 4 weeks with no billing, every invoice collected and no payment fees. The table follows that example through each pricing decision and names the guide that covers the step in depth.
| Step | Calculation | Result | Go deeper |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Billable hours in a year | 25 hours × (52 − 4) weeks | 1,200 hours | Rate floor tables |
| 2. Amount to invoice | $75,000 assumed income goal + $5,000 assumed operating costs | $80,000.00 | True business costs |
| 3. Hourly floor | $80,000 ÷ 1,200 hours | $66.67 (rounded up from $66.666…) | Calculator |
| 4. Floor at 20 or 30 billable hours a week | $80,000 ÷ 960 hours; $80,000 ÷ 1,440 hours | $83.34; $55.56 | Calculator stress test |
| 5. Collect 95% of invoices and pay 3% in payment fees | $80,000 ÷ (0.95 × 0.97), then ÷ 1,200 hours | $86,814.98 to invoice; floor $72.35 | Invoicing and net terms |
| 6. Test a rate of $80.00 an hour | $80.00 × 1,200 hours − $5,000 assumed costs | $91,000.00 before taxes; $16,000.00 above the goal | Hourly, project or retainer |
| 7. Lowest acceptable price for a 10-hour project | 10 hours × 1.20 = 12 hours; 12 × $66.666… = $800.00; + $100 direct costs = $900.00 | $900.00 lowest acceptable price (quote above it) | Hourly, project or retainer |
| 8. Plan federal taxes on the income | Self-employment tax and income tax are paid out of the $75,000 goal | Self-employment tax about $10,597.16 ($75,000 × 0.9235 × 15.3%), about $8.83 per billable hour; income tax figured separately | Self-employment tax; 2026 estimated taxes |
Row 4 is what the calculator’s stress test shows for your own inputs: the floor at 20% fewer and 20% more billable hours than you enter. The rate floor tables assume $6,000 a year in business costs rather than the calculator’s $5,000 starting value, so their $75,000 row reads $67.50 at 25 hours where this example gives $66.67.
Rows 5 and 6 show why the invoicing guide sits next to the pricing guides. At the same $80.00 rate, collecting 95% of invoices and paying 3% in fees cuts income before taxes from $91,000.00 to $83,464.00, and the cushion above the goal from $16,000.00 to $8,464.00. Nothing about the work changed; only the money that reached the bank account did.
Author’s practice. Quote above the floor, never at it. The floor funds the plan exactly, so the gap between the floor and your quoted rate is what absorbs slow months, unpaid proposal time and estimates that run long. Re-run the numbers whenever a recurring cost changes, whenever your billable hours shift for more than a month, and once a year before you send rate-change notices.
Look up the floor for eight income goals from $40,000 to $150,000 at 15 to 40 billable hours a week. Then see what the common salary-divided-by-2,080 shortcut gets wrong, and how one more billable hour, extra time off, a benefits budget, payment fees or unpaid invoices move the rate.
Hourly floors for ten common freelance skills, from software development to photography, each set to match the national median pay of an employee in that occupation and then converted into the unit clients buy: a word, a day, a project or a month. A checklist then makes two quotes comparable on scope, revisions and usage rights before you compare prices.
One cost-stack worksheet applied to photographers, videographers, bookkeepers, virtual assistants and tutors. It turns annual costs into a price per session, package or client-month, and counts editing, preparation and admin time as well as the hours the client sees.
When each pricing model fits, with the author’s default for each, who carries the cost when a job runs longer than estimated, and how many hours of overrun push a fixed fee below your floor.
Gather employee wage data, advertised quotes and fees you have actually collected without mixing the three: rules for what to include, how to drop duplicate postings, a filled comparison set for ten occupations from May 2025 federal wage data, a budget table that runs from inputs to an hourly floor, and a worksheet template with a column for each detail to record about a source, including its date and scope.
The 2026 figures, including the $184,500 Social Security wage base; what 15.3%, 7.65% and 0.9235 mean; the tax worked out at five profit levels from $30,000 to $200,000; how wages from a job use up the wage base; how the deduction for half of the tax works; and how much of each billable hour the tax takes.
Work through the two-part payment test, the 100% versus 110% prior-year route, the exact 2026 due dates, how withholding counts, and the method for uneven income, step by step from Form 1040-ES.
Find every cost of running the business, total the yearly budget, see which costs move your floor the most, keep health cover, retirement saving and taxes from being counted twice, and enter the totals in the calculator’s Business operating costs ($/year) and Personal benefits budget ($/year) fields.
The fields that keep an invoice from stalling in a client’s payables queue, what net terms mean for the day cash arrives, deposits and milestone billing, a reminder schedule, and where to check the late-fee rules that apply to your agreement.
Size the raise from your rate floor, choose the notice date, draft the message, and work out how much paid work a raise can lose before it stops paying off.