Free effective hourly rate calculator
Your quoted rate is a promise; this page is the audit. A project pays $4,000 and takes the 40 hours you planned — and then six more hours of revisions beyond the scope, four of calls and admin, and two of quietly fixing things. The project really took 52 hours, and it really paid $76.92 an hour against the $95 you quoted: a 19.0% leak that never appeared on any invoice. Enter a finished project's real numbers — the fee that actually landed and every hour it actually took — and this calculator shows the rate you truly earned, what the unpaid hours cost you, and the fee that would have paid your rate.
One finished project, audited
Audit the project as it was, not as the proposal remembers it: hours from your calendar and your sent folder, not from the estimate. A project remembered at its planned hours always passes its own audit.
The rate it really paid
Enter a finished project's numbers and the verdict appears here.
What the finished project really paid per hour, once every hour is counted.
| Fee actually received | — |
| Planned / billed hours | — |
| Unpaid revisions beyond scope | — |
| Unpaid calls & admin | — |
| Unpaid fixing & rework | — |
| Total unpaid hours | — |
| Total real hours | — |
| Rate over planned hours alone | — |
| Effective hourly rate | — |
| Your target rate | — |
| Gap vs target, per hour | — |
| Gap vs target, overall | — |
| Value of the unpaid hours at your target rate | — |
| Fee that would have paid your target for these hours | — |
| That is more than you charged by | — |
| Total hours this fee could afford at your target | — |
Enter a finished project's fee and its real hours, and this line reads the audit back to you.
Worked example
A project quoted at $95 an hour: a $4,000 fee built on 40 planned hours. It finished — after six hours of revisions beyond the scope, four hours of calls and chasing approvals, and two hours of fixing a misread brief — having taken 52. Enter those numbers above and the calculator returns exactly this:
| Fee actually received | $4,000.00 |
| Planned hours | 40 |
| Unpaid hours (6 revisions + 4 calls & admin + 2 rework) | 12 |
| Total real hours | 52 |
| Rate over planned hours alone | $100.00 |
| Effective hourly rate | $76.92 |
| Gap vs the $95 target | -$18.08 an hour (-19.0%) |
| Value of the 12 unpaid hours at $95 | $1,140.00 |
| Fee that would have paid $95 for 52 hours | $4,940.00 |
| Hours the $4,000 fee could afford at $95 | 42.1 |
| Verdict | Underwater |
Read the two rates against each other, because the flattering one is the trap: over the planned hours the fee looks like $100 an hour — better than quoted. Over the hours that actually happened it paid $76.92, and the twelve unpaid hours were a $1,140 discount given to nobody in particular, decided by nobody at all. The fixes are both printed above: the same work at $4,940, or the same fee with the work held to 42.1 hours. A bigger version of the same shape: a $6,000 fee on 50 planned hours at a $120 target, with twenty unpaid hours across the three buckets, really took 70 hours and paid $85.71 — the fee that would have paid the target is $8,400, and the unpaid hours were worth $2,400.
How the audit works
- The three unpaid buckets are kept separate because each has a different cure. Revisions beyond scope are a documents problem: the rounds were never capped, so they never ended — the fix lives in the scope terms and the milestone sign-offs, the discipline our guide to handling scope creep sets out. To price that one bucket on its own — the creep portion of a project, isolated while it can still be billed, traded or repriced — the scope creep cost calculator counts the unagreed extras and what they cost at your rate. Calls and admin are a boundaries problem: the client had unlimited access to your day, and the fix is the availability you state up front, covered in our guide to freelance availability and boundaries. To price that bucket on its own — the standing meetings and their prep, run across a whole year at your rate — the meeting cost calculator turns the calendar itself into a number. Rework is a craft problem: your own misreads and mistakes, redone at your own cost. No client caused it and no client conversation fixes it — which is exactly why it must be counted: it is the one bucket only you can shrink, through better briefs, earlier checks and slower first passes on the parts that historically break.
- A promise and an audit are different instruments. The project profitability calculator asks this question forwards — will this fee survive the hours and costs I estimate, before the work starts. This page asks it backwards, on a finished project, with the hours already spent and the fee already in the bank. Run the first before you quote and this one after you deliver; a practice that only ever runs the first is grading its own homework with the answers it hoped for.
- The fix menu has three items, and this page prices the first. Raise the price: the fee that would have paid your target for the same real hours is printed in the results — that number, not a guess, is the next quote for work of this shape. Cap the leak: write the revision rounds into the scope document itself — the scope of work generator builds the document with the change-request rule already in it, so the next project's tenth revision is a priced conversation instead of a free one. Or shrink the delivery: fewer deliverables at the same fee, decided before the work starts — a forward decision, priced with the profitability calculator, not a quiet reduction in quality halfway through.
- Run it on your last three projects, not your best one. The temptation is to audit the project you are proud of, and its number will comfort you. The audit earns its keep on the ordinary run: the last three finished projects, whatever they were, including the one you would rather forget. Three audits show the pattern — which bucket leaks on every job, and whether the gap is one bad client or a habit in your own estimating. One audit is an anecdote; three are a diagnosis.
- The unpaid hours are a discount — read them as one. Twelve unpaid hours at a $95 target is $1,140 you chose not to charge. Discounts are legitimate tools when they are decided: traded for a testimonial, a longer engagement, a faster payment. An undecided discount buys nothing — not goodwill the client knows about, not a reference, not a lesson itemised anywhere. The point of printing its value is not self-punishment; it is moving the discount from something that happens to you to something you occasionally, deliberately, do.
One more translation, for the oldest argument in freelancing: a client insists your rate “sounds like” a two-hundred-thousand salary. The hourly to salary equivalent calculator runs that claim honestly — your rate over your real billable hours and working weeks, minus expenses and your tax set-aside, beside the napkin number it is usually compared with.