Tool 1 of the Get Paid Kit · For personal chefs

Personal Chef hourly rate calculator

This free calculator works out the hourly rate a personal chef should charge, starting from the income you need — then converts it into the per-service and per-event prices clients actually book. The cooking happens in clients' homes, in the evenings and at events; the planning, lists and travel happen off the clock unless you price them in. With the honest presets below it lands near $87 an hour: a weekly meal-prep service at about four hours prices near $348, and a dinner-party event at about six hours near $522.

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The pricing reality for freelance personal chefs

A personal chef's product is an evening in someone else's kitchen. The visible part is the cooking — the meal-prep session, the dinner party, the event. Around it sit the invisible parts: menus planned, dietary needs checked, shopping lists written, your own kit packed, driven across town and unpacked again. Clients buy the evening. The rate has to price the day around it.

One honesty note on the numbers: food costs are usually passed through to the client — the client pays for the ingredients, at cost or bought on the client's own card — rather than carried in the chef's expenses. The $3,000 expenses preset below is therefore kit, transport and admin only: knives and equipment, fuel and parking, booking software and insurance. If you do front the groceries, price that separately; it is not in this rate.

The weekly regular is this trade’s retainer, and it behaves like one. Same kitchen, same household, dietary needs already known: the planning shrinks with every visit, the shopping gets faster, and the cooking itself becomes rhythm rather than problem-solving. What never shrinks to zero is the structure around it — menus still get written, lists still get made, and the road is the same length in month twelve as in month one. The trap is pricing the familiarity as if the structure had vanished along with the difficulty. It has not. A regular’s discount should come out of the planning time that genuinely disappeared, counted honestly — and the dinner-party season will test whatever margin is left, because December evenings are the scarcest thing a personal chef owns.

The preset below starts billable time at 50%: cooking and service bill, but planning, travel and admin take the rest. The numbers are starting presets, not a survey: a $54,000 target income, $3,000 a year of expenses — kit, transport and admin, with food costs passed through to clients as explained above — and 50% billable time. With those starting numbers the calculator lands near $87 an hour.

Your numbers — personal chef presets

Your recommended rate

$0 / hour
$0Day rate (8 hours)
0Billable hours per year
Income + expenses needed$0
Grossed up for tax$0
With profit margin$0
Working weeks0
Total working hours0
Billable hours0

Your rate is saved on this device only, so the Proposal Generator can show it when you price a project.

Easy to miss

Costs personal chefs forget to put in the rate

  • Planning and menus. Every client eats differently: allergies, dislikes, the child who eats three things. Menu planning and dietary checking happen before you touch a pan, and they are work.
  • Travel and packing. Your kitchen travels with you. Packing kit, driving across town, unpacking and repacking at the other end is time the evening's price has to carry.
  • Kit wear. Knives, pans, containers and cool boxes wear, chip and walk away. Replacing professional kit is a steady cost, not an occasional surprise.
  • Evening and event hours. The work lands when everyone else is off — evenings, weekends, holidays. Unsocial hours are the job, and the rate is where that gets recognised.
  • Insurance and food-safety certification. Working with food in other people's homes needs liability cover and current food-hygiene certification. It belongs in the expenses, every year.
The maths

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 personal chef presets — four weeks off, 40 hours a week, 50% billable — that is 960 billable hours a year: the cooking and service hours left once planning, travel and admin have taken theirs.

Next, work out what those hours must bring in. Add your desired income and your annual business expenses together — $57,000 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 $76,000 — then add your profit margin to reach $83,600 and divide by your billable hours. That final number, $87, is the rate below which the year stops adding up.

Now convert it into the units clients buy. A weekly meal-prep service — one visit, a fridge filled — runs about four hours with planning and travel, and prices at $348. A dinner party or small event, about six hours door to door, is $522. A full day of event cooking is the $697 day rate. Ingredients sit on top, passed through at cost as agreed — the rate pays for you, not for the food.

Put a price on loyalty, carefully. One household’s weekly service at four hours and $348 comes to $1,392 across a four-week month. A ten percent regulars’ discount — the kind offered warmly at the kitchen table — hands back $139.20 a month, which is $1,670.40 across a year: nearly two full event fees, given away in slices too small to notice. If the planning for that household has genuinely halved, an honest smaller discount exists inside the hours — quote the service at three and a half hours, $304.50, and the client can see exactly what their loyalty bought. A percentage off the whole fee hides that arithmetic from both of you, which is precisely why percentages get offered and hours should be quoted.

Disclaimer: This is a planning estimate, not tax advice. Tax rates, deductions and allowances vary by country, state and business structure. Enter the rate you expect to pay, and check significant decisions with a qualified accountant.
Next: build a proposal with this rate Use the general rate calculator
Questions

Personal Chef rate questions

Usually not inside the rate. The standard arrangement is that the client pays for ingredients — at cost, or bought on the client's own card from your list — while your fee covers your time, kit and travel. That is why these presets keep food out of the $3,000 expenses: mixing groceries into your fee hides your real rate and invites arguments about receipts.
Per service or per event, because that is how clients book — a weekly prep visit, a dinner party. But build each price from your hours: on these presets, a four-hour meal-prep service is $348 and a six-hour event is $522. A flat price set by feel, without the hours counted, is how a full diary still ends the month short.
Because half the job never happens near a stove. Menus, dietary checks, shopping lists, packing, driving between homes and the admin of bookings all take real hours that no client watches you work. The 50% counts them honestly — it is the shape of the week, not pessimism.
By the kitchen hours, not the chairs. A party of eight usually sits inside the standard six-hour event at $522, cooked solo. Past ten or twelve covers, the courses, the plating and the clearing outgrow one pair of hands in real time: the same menu honestly becomes an eight-hour event, $696, before any help is counted — and if you bring an assistant, their hours go on the quote as a line of their own, agreed in advance, like the ingredients. What never works is holding the six-hour price for a twelve-cover evening and recovering the difference in exhaustion.

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