Billable Hours Calculator
75% billable
You billed 30 of the 40 hours you worked.
- Hours you did not bill
- 10
- Billable hours over 48 weeks
- 1,440
How this is calculated
Utilisation is the share of the time you work that you can actually charge for, and it is the number that quietly decides whether your rate is high enough. Divide the hours you billed by the hours you worked and you get it. The reason it matters is that everything else in freelancing is priced per billable hour while your life is lived in worked hours, and the gap between them is not small. Proposals, invoicing, chasing payment, marketing, bookkeeping, learning the thing the next job needs and answering emails about a project that finished in March are all real work that no client pays for. A freelancer at seventy-five percent utilisation and one at fifty percent doing identical work at an identical rate earn very different livings, and the difference is invisible on a rate card. Measure it for a couple of ordinary weeks before you decide your rate is the problem, because moving utilisation from fifty to sixty is often easier than raising prices by twenty percent, and it compounds in exactly the same way.
Worked example
Thirty of forty hours is seventy-five percent, which is a strong week by freelance standards. The ten unbilled hours are not waste, they are the business running itself, but they are hours your rate has to cover. Across a forty-eight week year those thirty billable hours become 1,440, which is the figure the hourly rate calculator wants.
Inputs: 30 hours billed against 40 hours worked
Result: 75% billable, 10 hours unbilled
What this assumes
- Billable hours are hours you can actually invoice, not hours you hope to invoice. Work you write off does not count.
- The annual projection uses the working weeks you enter. Forty-eight is a realistic default once holiday and illness are subtracted; fifty-two quietly overstates the total.
- Utilisation says nothing about whether the invoices get paid. That is what the late payment tools are for.
Questions
- What is a good utilisation rate?
- Sixty to seventy-five percent is a realistic target for an established solo freelancer. Above eighty is usually either a very short measurement window or a sign that unbilled work is quietly not getting done. Below fifty is worth investigating, though it is normal early on and during any month with a lot of pitching.
- Should I count admin as worked hours?
- Yes. That is the entire point. If you only count the hours you billed you will measure one hundred percent every week and learn nothing. Count everything you did for the business, including the parts nobody pays for.
- How do I raise it?
- Usually by removing work rather than working faster. Fewer, larger clients cut proposal and invoicing overhead. Templates cut setup time. Deposits and clear terms cut chasing. Saying no to a bad-fit enquiry costs an hour instead of ten.