Free price increase calculator
A rate rise is not a bet on keeping every client. It is arithmetic about how many you can afford to lose. Raise $95 an hour by 10% and the new rate is $104.50 — and at that rate you could lose 9.09% of your billable hours and still earn exactly what you earn now. Lose less than that, and the rise pays for itself even with the departures. The fear that stops most rises — “I’ll lose clients” — is a feeling; the break-even loss underneath it is a number. This calculator runs that number on your own figures: your current rate, the rise you are planning, and the share of work you honestly think might walk. Most freelancers are surprised how much room it leaves.
The rise you are planning
The feared loss is a guess; the break-even is not. Run the guess through the arithmetic before you let it veto the rise — a fear that survives the numbers is information, and one that does not was never a reason.
What the rise does
Enter your rate and the rise you are planning, and the verdict appears here.
| Current rate | — |
| Planned increase | — |
| New rate | — |
| Billable hours now, a month | — |
| Hours you might lose | — |
| Billable hours after the loss | — |
| Revenue now, a month | — |
| Revenue after, a month | — |
| Difference, a month | — |
| Difference, a year | — |
| Break-even loss — the share of hours you could lose and earn exactly the same | — |
Enter a rise and this line explains how to read the break-even honestly.
Worked example
A designer charges $95 an hour and bills 96 hours a month — $9,120. They are planning a 10% rise, and they fear losing 10% of the work. Enter those numbers above and the calculator returns exactly this:
| Current rate | $95.00 |
| Planned increase | 10% |
| New rate | $104.50 |
| Billable hours, a month | 96 hours |
| Revenue now, a month | $9,120.00 |
| Hours after a 10% loss | 86.4 hours |
| Revenue after, a month | $9,028.80 |
| Difference | −$91.20 a month (−$1,094.40 a year) |
| Break-even loss | 9.09% |
| Verdict | At that loss, the rise costs you |
Read it carefully, because the fear and the arithmetic are telling different stories. At a 10% rise you can afford to lose 9.09% of your hours — the feared 10% overshoots the break-even by less than a single point, and the cost of the overshoot is $91.20 a month, not the practice. Now assume a 5% loss instead: 91.2 hours survive, and the same rise is worth $9,530.40 a month — $410.40 ahead, $4,924.80 a year. And a bigger rise buys a bigger cushion: at $60 an hour, a 25% rise to $75.00, with 80 billable hours and a 15% loss, turns $4,800 a month into $5,100 — $300 ahead — because the break-even at 25% is a full 20.0% of your hours. The question is never really whether anyone leaves. It is whether the ones who leave take more than the break-even with them.
How the break-even works
- The maths, in plain words. The new rate is the old rate × (1 + the increase). The break-even loss is 1 − (1 ÷ (1 + the increase)): the share of hours whose loss the higher price on the surviving hours exactly cancels. At +10% it is 9.09%; at +25% it is 20.0%. The cushion grows faster than intuition expects, because every hour that stays is paid at the new rate — the rise does its work on all the hours that do not leave.
- Why the feared loss usually overshoots. The clients who would leave over a 10% rise were usually already shopping — price was the only thing holding them, and it was going to stop holding them eventually anyway. Clients buying an outcome from someone they trust rarely re-tender the work over a modest rise announced with notice. The loss people fear is the loss of everyone, all at once; the loss that actually happens is the loss of the already-half-gone, spread over months.
- Stage the rise if the numbers are tight. If your assumed loss sits past the break-even, shrink the rise — or stage it: new clients at the new rate from today, existing clients at renewal or at a stated date. How to raise your rates walks the timing and the announcement email; staged that way, the rise lands in steps small enough for any hours that leave to be replaced between them.
- Tell existing clients first, and honour booked work. A rise announced a month ahead, with work already booked finished at the agreed rate, is a price change; the same rise sprung mid-project is leverage, and clients can tell the difference. Grandfather briefly by all means — a fixed window is fair — but an open-ended grandfather is the rise postponed forever. When a client pushes back on the number itself rather than the timing, freelance rate negotiation covers that conversation.
- Freed hours are only valuable if they refill. If some work does leave, the hours it frees are worth exactly nothing until something fills them — price the gap with the utilization calculator, and fill it with work that repeats: how to productize a freelance service turns the job you have done five times into a fixed package that sells without a fresh negotiation each time. An hour resold at the new rate is worth more than the hour that left at the old one.