The Freelance Rate Floor Calculator
You matched your rate to somebody else's, whose costs, working weeks and unbillable hours you could not see, and you still cannot say it without your voice going up at the end.
View on Etsy (opens in a new tab)The current price is on Etsy. We make and sell this ourselves — this is not an affiliate link.
What’s inside
- The Rate Floor Calculator, a live spreadsheet: four inputs about your own life, every intermediate figure shown, and the rate computed last. Leave an input blank and it names the missing one instead of printing a plausible number.
- The Unbillable Ratio Tracker and the Billable Weeks Worksheet: ten working days with two running totals, then 52 minus holiday, illness, gaps between projects and dead weeks, down to the hours that get billed.
- The Tax Reserve Derivation Sheet: the method for finding your own reserve rate from your own last filed return. It states no percentage anywhere, and neither does any other page.
- The Three-Tier Pricing Builder: three options built off your floor rather than off a competitor, with a check that no tier sits below it.
- The Rate Conversation Cards and the Quarterly Review Checklist: the answer to "what's your rate?", four replies to "that's more than we budgeted" that are not discounts, the walk-away, the message that raises an existing client, then twenty minutes four times a year to log your floor against what you are actually charging.
Who this is for
Your rate is not a price. It is a floor, and it is the last thing you calculate, not the first. The free advice on freelance pricing is excellent, and all of it assumes you already know your costs, your billable ratio and your working weeks; in your first two years you have none of those, so the good advice has nothing to operate on. This is the missing part: the derivation, four inputs in order, with the awkward conversations written out.
It comes as seven parts in five files, and the playbook that teaches them works the floor twice in full, once for a designer and once for a writer, every figure derived rather than asserted. Both turn out to be charging below their floor.