Game Developer hourly rate calculator
This free calculator works out the hourly rate a freelance or contract game developer should charge, starting from the income you need — not from a salary divided by the wrong number of hours. It counts the playtests, build wrangling, studio meetings and integration time that fill a contract week, divides by the hours you can actually bill, and converts the result into the day and sprint terms studios actually buy. One honest boundary: this prices contract work sold by time — indie self-publishing is a product business with no client and no rate, and its maths is a different subject entirely.
The pricing reality for freelance game developers
Freelance game development usually means contracting into someone else’s project: a studio needs a prototype, a systems pass, a port, or extra hands before a milestone. The work is sprint-shaped and reviewed in builds, and a surprising share of it is not writing code — it is playtesting, integrating other people’s assets, fixing what the last build broke and sitting in the meetings where the next milestone gets defined.
That is why the preset below starts billable time at 50%. Build wrangling, ramp-up on each studio’s engine version and pipeline, estimating and communication are real hours that never appear in the game. The tools cost money too — engine and version-control seats where they are chargeable, capable hardware and test devices — and they sit inside the $4,600 expenses figure below. Developers contracting on apps rather than games run the same maths on the mobile app developer presets.
The numbers below are starting presets, not a survey: a $72,000 target income, $4,600 a year of expenses and 50% billable time. With those starting numbers the calculator lands near $117 an hour. Change any figure to match your own books; the point is that the non-coding half of contract work gets counted before the day rate is quoted, not donated to the milestone.
Your numbers — game developer presets
Your recommended rate
| Income + expenses needed | $0 |
| Grossed up for tax | $0 |
| With profit margin | $0 |
| Working weeks | 0 |
| Total working hours | 0 |
| Billable hours | 0 |
Your rate is saved on this device only, so the Proposal Generator can show it when you price a project.
Costs game developers forget to put in the rate
- Engine and pipeline ramp-up. Every studio runs a different engine version, source-control setup and build process, and learning it is unpaid time at the start of every contract.
- Hardware and test devices. A machine that builds the project quickly, plus the phones or hardware the builds must run on, are the entry ticket to contract work.
- Playtest and fix cycles. Every review build generates a round of bugs, tuning and polish that was not in anyone’s estimate. It arrives on a schedule; the rate is where it gets paid for.
- Tooling seats. Engine subscriptions where chargeable, large-repo hosting and the profiler and asset tools of the trade recur quietly each month.
- Between-contract upkeep. Demos, a portfolio build and keeping current with engine changes happen in the gaps, and the gaps are part of the business the rate has to carry.
How this calculator works
Start with the hours you can genuinely sell. Take 52 weeks, subtract your vacation weeks, multiply by your hours per week, then multiply by your billable percentage. With the game developer presets — four weeks off, 40 hours a week, 50% billable — that is 960 billable hours a year, well under the 2,080 hours a salaried job is counted on. That gap is why dividing a target salary by 2,080 always underprices contract development.
Next, work out what those hours must bring in. Add your desired income and your annual business expenses together — $76,600 on the presets — gross the total up for tax by dividing by one minus your tax rate — at a 25% estimate, divide by 0.75 to get $102,133 — then add your profit margin to reach $112,347 and divide by your billable hours. That final number, $117, is the rate below which the year stops adding up.
Now convert it back into the units studios buy. A day at the preset rate is $936, so a two-week sprint of ten working days is $9,360 of development time, and a 40-hour prototype block is $4,680. The prototype is the honest way to sell the unknown: a fixed block of days that proves a mechanic, priced before anyone has to guess what the whole game costs.
Game Developer rate questions
Rates differ by trade — the same maths runs with different presets for graphic designer rates, freelance writer rates, web developer rates, marketing consultant rates, photographer rates, video editor rates, virtual assistant rates, social media manager rates, bookkeeper rates, translator rates, business coach rates, illustrator rates, copywriter rates, UX designer rates, SEO consultant rates, data analyst rates, motion designer rates, technical writer rates, podcast editor rates, email marketer rates, life coach rates, proofreader rates, event planner rates, voice actor rates, online tutor rates, personal trainer rates, interior designer rates, music producer rates, grant writer rates, UX researcher rates, book editor rates, transcriptionist rates, presentation designer rates, brand strategist rates, video producer rates, art director rates, WordPress developer rates, mobile app developer rates, 3D artist rates, Shopify developer rates, online business manager rates, podcast producer rates and data entry specialist rates, or start from the general freelance hourly rate calculator.