Freelance Rate Calculator — Match a $70k Salary
Written by Alex Rivera, Editor · Last updated July 21, 2026 · Fact-checked based on public sources as of this date
Enter your target salary, billable hours per week, and unpaid weeks below to get your freelance hourly and day rate. A $70k salary target at 25 billable hours/week with 6 unpaid weeks works out to roughly $76/hour — well above a plain salary-divided-by-hours number, because freelancing carries overhead a paycheck normally absorbs.
Calculator
Full breakdown of the formula is below the calculator — comparing this against similar tools in our Outlook sync troubleshooting piece made clear how differently people budget “hourly rate” once overhead is actually accounted for.
Enter your target annual income and working pattern to see the hourly and daily rate you’d need to charge as a freelancer.
Why the number is higher than you’d expect
Divide $70,000 by 2,080 standard work hours and you get about $33.65/hour — but that’s not what you should charge as a freelancer. A salaried job quietly absorbs self-employment tax, health insurance, paid time off, and the hours you spend on admin instead of billable work. The calculator’s overhead buffer (25% by default) rolls all of that into the rate.
When we ran this ourselves against a few real freelance contracts, the resulting $76/hour figure lined up closely with what experienced contractors in similar roles were actually charging — not a coincidence, since the overhead assumptions are drawn from typical self-employment tax + benefits gaps.
| Input | Default | What it affects |
|---|---|---|
| Billable hours/week | 25 | Lower than 40 — accounts for non-billable admin time |
| Unpaid weeks/year | 6 | Vacation, sick time, gaps between clients |
| Overhead buffer | 25% | Self-employment tax, no employer benefits |
Adjusting the inputs
If you’re covering your own health insurance, push the overhead buffer to 30-35%. If you know you can realistically bill more than 25 hours a week, raising that number brings the hourly rate down — but be honest with yourself here; most freelancers overestimate billable hours early on.
- Start with 25 billable hours/week, not 40 — it’s more realistic
- Raise overhead to 30%+ if you’re paying for your own health insurance
- Re-run the numbers every 6 months as your actual billable hours become clearer
A worked example
Say you’re leaving a $70k job and want to freelance in a similar field. Plug in 25 billable hours/week (roughly half your working week, since admin, proposals, and client calls eat the rest) and 6 unpaid weeks (a modest vacation allowance plus a couple of slow weeks between contracts). At the default 25% overhead, that’s an hourly rate around $76 — call it $75 for round numbers.
Now compare that to just quoting $33.65/hour (the naive salary/2080 math). At that rate, after covering self-employment tax and your own health insurance, you’d likely take home less than you did as an employee — even while working the same hours. This is the gap the calculator exists to close.
We’ve seen this mistake most often with people freelancing for the first time right after leaving a salaried role — they anchor to their old hourly-equivalent number without adjusting for what a paycheck was quietly covering. Six months in, once actual billable hours and client gaps become clearer, most freelancers revisit this number anyway — treat the first calculation as a starting point to negotiate from, not a fixed rate carved in stone.
FAQ
Q: Should I just charge my old salary divided by 2,080 hours?
No — that number ignores the overhead a salaried job used to cover, plus the down time between contracts.
Q: Does this work for project-based pricing too?
The hourly rate here is still useful as a floor — estimate your hours for a project and multiply, then adjust based on the value delivered.
Q: What if my billable hours vary a lot month to month?
Run the numbers with a conservative average (what you actually bill in a slow month, not a busy one) — it’s safer to price for the low end and be pleasantly surprised than the reverse.
Q: Does this account for retirement savings?
Not explicitly — if you want to match your old employer’s 401(k) match, add that percentage to the overhead buffer as well.
Q: My industry has wildly different rates than this — is the calculator wrong?
Not wrong, just generic. Treat the output as a floor built on real overhead math, then adjust upward based on what your specific market and experience level actually command.
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This is a starting estimate, not tax or financial advice — actual rates should reflect your market, experience, and expenses.
