Freelance Rate & Pricing Calculator

Most freelancers pick a rate out of the air and hope the year adds up. This one works backwards from the money you actually want to keep each month, adds your overheads, the time you will not be billing and the tax you owe, then divides what is left by the hours you can genuinely sell. You get the minimum rate, the gross revenue target, and quotes for three project sizes. Everything runs in this tab.

Runs in your browser ETB and USD Quote matrix included

Your numbers

Amounts are Ethiopian Birr unless the field says otherwise. Everything recalculates as you type.

Take-home income you need each month

The amount that lands in your account, after tax, not the amount you invoice. This is the number the calculator works back from.

Fixed monthly business overhead

Internet package, coworking desk, equipment, software and hosting, added together. This has to be covered before the take-home figure is reached.

Target working hours per week

The hours you actually work, not the hours you wish you worked. The default is a forty hour week.

Billable efficiency

65%

The share of those hours a client is actually paying for. The rest goes to proposals, invoicing, calls, revisions and looking for the next job.

Unpaid vacation days a year

Sick leave buffer a year

Days you are not paid for come straight off the hours you can sell. Paid leave is different: it is already inside your working hours, so leave it out here.

A realistic sick day buffer, not an optimistic one. Freelancers rarely get paid for illness, so unbilled sick days are unpaid time.

Income tax and withholding estimate

15%

A flat estimate of everything withheld from your invoices, as a share of gross revenue. Set it to your real effective rate once you have a filing behind you.

Exchange rate for USD figures

161 ETB = 1 USD. This is the reference snapshot from the exchange rate tracker, taken from exchangerate-api.com on 6 October 2026, not a live feed. Overwrite it with the rate your contract actually uses.

Your figures stay in this browser and are offered again next time. Nothing is sent anywhere, and the button above removes them.

Minimum hourly rate

Updates as you type.

Minimum rate per billable hour

—

Enter the take-home pay you need each month to begin.

Gross revenue needed a month Covers tax and overhead before you take anything —

Gross revenue needed a year Twelve months at the same run rate —

Tax and withholding a month Your estimated rate applied to gross —

Overhead a month Internet, desk, equipment, software —

Take-home a month Gross minus tax minus overhead —

Billable hours a year —

Billable hours a month —

Non-billable hours a year Admin, outreach, and the rest of the gap —

Working weeks a year —

Paid working days left —

Where every birr of gross goes

Gross revenue split three ways: what reaches your account, what the tax authority takes, and what your business costs consume before you earn anything.

The three parts always add back to gross, because the rate is solved from that identity rather than guessed. If the operating cost slice looks large, that is a signal to price it into the rate, not to hope it stays cheap.

Quotes you can send

The minimum rate applied to three common scopes, rounded up to the nearest 50 birr so the number reads like a price instead of a calculation.

Recommended project quotes for small, medium and large client scopes
Scope	Hours	Quote (ETB)	Quote (USD)
Enter a target income to build the quote matrix.

These are floors, not prices. Put a margin on top, quote a deposit, and remember that a 10 hour job only works if you can sell four of them a month.

How this is calculated

Paid working days = 365 minus your unpaid vacation and sick days. Dividing by seven gives the working weeks, and the working weeks times your weekly hours give the hours you have left.
Billable hours = those hours times your billable efficiency. Billable efficiency is the single biggest lever, and it is the one most people guess too generously.
Gross revenue = (take-home + overhead) x 12 divided by (1 minus your tax rate). The tax is applied to gross, so the division has to happen before the division by hours.
The minimum rate is gross revenue divided by billable hours. This page makes no network call, so the USD figures use the dated snapshot rate shown next to the field and nothing else.

The tax field is a flat estimate, not a bracket calculation. If you want the real progressive PAYE schedule on an Ethiopian salary, the salary and tax calculator works it out band by band. For business income the effective rate depends on deductions, expenses and how you are registered, so treat the slider as a planning assumption and correct it once you have a real figure.

This is a planning model, not financial advice, and it assumes a steady flow of work across the year. It does not model late payments, scope creep, non-paying clients, equipment purchases or the months you cannot invoice.