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Freelance Rate Floor Tables: 48 Scenarios, Computed

By Andrew James Flores · Published August 23, 2026 · Editorial Standards

Every number below is computed, not surveyed and not estimated. These are reference tables produced by running this site's calculator across a grid of inputs, so you can find your floor without typing anything — and so you can check my arithmetic.

Rate surveys tell you what other people say they charge. They cannot tell you what you need to charge, because that depends on your income target, your overhead, and how many hours a week you can actually invoice. That second question has an exact answer, and it is the same arithmetic every time. So rather than make you re-run it, I ran it — 48 scenarios across the range that covers most full-time and part-time US freelancing — and published the output as lookup tables.

This page is a companion to two others, and it is worth knowing which question each answers. The rate-ranges guide is about the market: what clients in a given skill area tend to pay. The benchmarking methodology is about building your own market estimate from public wage data. This page is neither. It is about your floor: the rate below which your own plan does not close, regardless of what the market pays. You want all three numbers before you quote anyone.

The formula behind every number here

One equation, no black box, identical to the one the calculator on the homepage runs in your browser:

floor = (income goal + expenses + benefits load) ÷ (billable hours per week × (52 − weeks off))

Unless a table says otherwise, every cell on this page uses $6,000 of annual business expenses, 4 weeks off, and the benefits load switched off. Those are stated so you can reproduce any cell yourself in about fifteen seconds — and so that when a number here looks wrong to you, you can find out which assumption we disagree about instead of just distrusting the table. If your expenses are higher than $6,000, add the difference to your income goal and read the row above; the formula is linear in that term, so this substitution is exact rather than approximate.

Table 1 — Your floor, by income goal and billable hours

Rows are the income you want to actually keep. Columns are hours per week you can genuinely invoice — not hours worked. Find your row, find your column, read your floor.

Read across any single row and the point of the whole site appears. A freelancer targeting $75,000 needs $67.50/hour at 25 billable hours a week — but only $42.19/hour if they could somehow invoice all 40. Nobody invoices 40. The 40-hour column is printed here precisely because it is the fantasy that sets most people's rates, and seeing it beside the honest columns is more persuasive than any argument.

Table 2 — The 2,080-hour error, in dollars

The most common way a new freelancer sets a rate is to divide the salary they want by 2,080 — 52 weeks of 40 hours, the employee's year. Here is what that shortcut costs, comparing it against the real floor at 25 billable hours a week.

The shortcut understates the required rate by 80 to 99 percent across this entire range. Not ten percent, not a rounding error — close to double, everywhere. And note the direction of the trend: the gap is widest at the lowest incomes, 99 percent at $40,000 versus 80 percent at $150,000, because a fixed $6,000 of overhead is a much larger share of a small target. The freelancers least able to absorb the mistake are the ones the mistake hits hardest. Someone charging $36.06/hour and wondering why a "$75,000 year" never materialises is not bad at business; they used the wrong denominator once, at the beginning, and never revisited it.

Table 3 — What one more billable hour per week is worth

The floor is not linear in billable hours — hours sit in the denominator, so the curve is a hyperbola. That has a practical consequence most pricing advice misses entirely: the value of recovering one hour a week depends enormously on where you are starting from. Below, a freelancer targeting $75,000 adds a single invoiceable hour per week at various starting points.

Going from 15 to 16 billable hours drops the required rate by $7.03/hour. Going from 35 to 36 drops it by $1.34. That is a 5.2× difference in the payoff from the exact same hour of recovered time, and it points somewhere specific: if you are lightly booked, fixing your utilisation — better lead flow, less unpaid scoping, tighter admin — moves your economics far more than a rate increase does. If you are already heavily booked, the opposite is true and the only real lever left is price. Most freelancers apply these remedies backwards, grinding for more hours when they are already full and quietly discounting when they are empty.

Table 4 — What time off actually costs

Unpaid time off does not reduce your income; it compresses the same income into fewer billable weeks, which raises the rate you must charge in the weeks you do work. Freelancers routinely take the time and skip the arithmetic, then wonder where the year went.

A standard four weeks of vacation, holidays, and sick days raises the required rate by $5.19/hour on a $75,000 target. That is the correct way to think about freelance time off: not as lost income, but as a surcharge you must build into every invoice for the other 48 weeks. Price it in at the start of the year and the holiday is genuinely a holiday. Skip that step and you are simply running a deficit you have not measured yet.

Table 5 — The benefits load, for people leaving a salaried job

If you are replacing employment that came with health insurance and a retirement match, those costs move onto your invoice. The calculator's optional benefits load adds 25 percent of the income goal — a deliberately conservative stand-in, since the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Employer Costs for Employee Compensation series puts total benefits nearer 29–31 percent of compensation for private-sector workers.

If you know your real premium and retirement target, ignore this table and put the actual dollar figures into the expenses field instead — a known number always beats a percentage assumption. The load exists for the person who has not priced a marketplace plan yet and needs a defensible placeholder for the conversation they are having this week.

What these tables deliberately do not tell you

A floor is a constraint, not a price. Nothing here knows what your market pays, and a floor of $63.89 does not mean anyone in your niche will pay it — that is what the rate ranges and the benchmarking method are for. Nothing here models federal or state income tax; treat the income column as a genuine after-tax target and put self-employment tax into expenses (see the SE-tax guide). And every cell assumes you collect every hour you bill, on time — an assumption the real world violates constantly, which is why invoicing and net terms belong in a pricing conversation at all.

Use the tables the way you would use a tide chart: they tell you exactly where the water is, and nothing at all about whether you should get in. Estimates only — not financial, tax, or legal advice.

Reproducing this page

Every figure above was generated by evaluating the formula at the top of this page across the stated grid; there is no survey data, no third-party dataset, and no estimate anywhere in the tables. The identical formula runs client-side in the calculator — view source on the homepage and read calc.js in full, it is about forty lines. If you find a cell that does not reproduce, that is a bug worth reporting: the contact page has the address, and per our editorial standards verified corrections are applied within a few days.

Sources

• Original computation by BillMyRate — all table values derived from the site's published rate formula, reproducible from the assumptions stated in each caption.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (basis for the 25% benefits load being described as conservative).
• IRS — Self-Employment Tax (the expense line the income field assumes you have already covered).

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