Fill in the form and download a clean PDF invoice. Free, with no signup and no watermark — your data never leaves your browser.
How to create an invoice
Add your details
Enter your business name, your client’s details, and an invoice number. Clients save on your device for next time.
Add line items, tax & currency
List what you’re billing with quantity and rate. Pick a currency, add tax or discount — totals calculate automatically.
Download the PDF
Click Download PDF for a clean, print-ready invoice to send to your client. No account, no email gate, no watermark.
Freelance Rate Calculator — Free, No Signup
By Innvoic
Most freelancers set their rate by copying a competitor’s, then wonder why the money never stretches. Your rate isn’t a market guess. It’s arithmetic: the salary you want, plus the business expenses an employer used to pay, plus the tax nobody withholds for you, divided by the hours you’ll actually bill. Get the math right once and every invoice you send stops leaking money. You don’t need an account to work through it, and once you know your number, Innvoic lets you invoice it with hourly line items, partial payments and PDF download, all in your browser.
The formula
Hourly rate = (desired annual salary + annual business expenses + tax buffer) ÷ billable hours per year. Each part matters:
- Desired salary: what you want to take home, not what you earned as an employee. Be honest with yourself here.
- Business expenses: software, hardware, coworking, insurance, accounting, home-office costs. Add them up. Most freelancers underestimate this by half.
- Tax buffer: no employer withholds tax for you, so set aside roughly 25–30% depending on your jurisdiction, or your actual effective rate if you know it.
- Billable hours: not 2,080. Between admin, marketing, downtime and holidays, most freelancers bill 900–1,200 hours a year. Use 1,000 if you’re unsure.
Worked example
Say you want $60,000 take-home, your business costs run $6,000 a year, and you set aside 25% for tax. Gross income needed: ($60,000 + $6,000) ÷ 0.75 = $88,000. Divide by 1,000 billable hours and you land on $88/hour. Now watch what happens without the tax buffer: you’d quote $66/hour and quietly hand $22,000 a year to the tax bill. Or assume 2,000 billable hours instead of 1,000, and you’d quote $44/hour and work twice as hard for the same money. The two most expensive mistakes in freelancing are ignoring tax and overestimating billable time.
Sanity-check against the market
The math gives you a floor, not a price. Compare it with what clients in your niche actually pay. If your floor is $88/hour and the market pays $50, you have a positioning problem: different clients, a sharper niche, a stronger portfolio. Not a math problem. If your floor is $88 and the market pays $120, raise your rate. You’re leaving money behind. Run the calculation again every year, because expenses creep and billable hours shrink as you get busier with better clients.
From rate to invoice
Once the number’s set, it should flow straight into billing without retyping. In Innvoic, switch a line item’s unit mode to Hours, enter your rate once, and log time per project. The line total, invoice total and amount-in-words all compute on their own. Email the invoice or download the PDF. If a client pays in two installments, record the first as a partial payment and the balance due stays exact. My Invoices keeps every invoice with its totals, so at year end you can export the CSV and find your real effective hourly rate: billed income divided by hours worked. If that number sits below your calculated rate, something leaked. Discounts you forgot, hours you didn’t log, or a rate you never raised.
What is a good freelance hourly rate?
One that covers your target salary, business expenses and tax, divided by realistic billable hours. For most freelancers that number is far higher than their first guess. Work the formula instead of copying competitors.
How many billable hours should I assume per year?
1,000 is a safe planning figure. Between marketing, admin, holidays and gaps between projects, few independents bill more than 50–60% of a standard work year.
Should I charge different rates for different clients?
You can, but keep one floor rate from the formula and treat anything below it as a deliberate, recorded discount. Not an accident. Innvoic’s invoice-level discount field lets you show the full rate with the reduction itemised.
How do I invoice hourly work professionally?
Log hours as line items with the unit set to Hours, add your rate, and let the totals compute. Note the work period briefly on each line, set your payment terms, and export or email the PDF. No signup required.
Related: bill those hours with the hourly invoice generator, freelance invoice generator, free invoice generator.