Free project profitability calculator
The fee is not the profit. Price your own hours first — at the rate your time has to earn — then add what the project costs in subcontractor help and expenses, then let the payment fee take the cut it takes before the money ever reaches you, and only what survives all four is profit. Most freelancers have never run that subtraction, and it shows: on the defaults below, a $6,000 project that feels healthy costs $7,605 to deliver once 55 hours at a $110 cost rate, a 10% revision buffer, $800 of subcontractor help and $150 of expenses are charged against it — and the card fee takes another $174 off the top, so $5,826 is what actually arrives. It loses $1,779 — a margin of -30.5% on what arrives, and an effective rate of $96.30 an hour instead of the $110 quoted. Put your own fee and hours in. A project does not have to go wrong to lose money; it only has to go unpriced.
The project, honestly costed
Why your own rate, and why first? Because a project that does not pay for your time has not made a profit — it has spent your hours and called the remainder earnings. If you do not have a rate you trust, build one first in the hourly rate calculator; every figure on this page inherits it.
What the project really makes
Enter the fee, your hours and your rate, and the verdict appears here.
Enter the fee, your hours and your rate.
| Your hours, buffer included | — |
| Your time cost | — |
| Subcontractor costs | — |
| Direct expenses | — |
| Total cost to deliver | — |
| Project fee | — |
| Payment fee (2.9% of the fee) | — |
| What actually arrives | — |
| Break-even fee for this job | — |
| Fee needed for a 30% margin | — |
Enter the project’s fee and cost its hours honestly, and this line reads the shape of the answer back to you.
Worked example
A designer quotes $6,000 for a project they estimate at 55 of their own hours, at the $110 an hour their time has to earn. A subcontractor handles one part for $800, the project itself creates $150 of expenses, a 10% buffer covers the revisions and overruns that always arrive, and the client pays by card, so 2.9% of the fee never reaches the designer at all. Enter those numbers above and the calculator returns exactly this:
| Project fee | $6,000.00 |
| Your hours (55 + 10% buffer) | 60.5 hours |
| Your time cost (60.5 × $110) | $6,655.00 |
| Subcontractor costs | $800.00 |
| Direct expenses | $150.00 |
| Total cost to deliver | $7,605.00 |
| Payment fee (2.9% of the fee) | $174.00 |
| What actually arrives | $5,826.00 |
| Profit | -$1,779.00 |
| Margin | -30.5% |
| Effective hourly rate | $96.30 |
| Break-even fee for this job | $7,832.13 |
| Fee needed for a 30% margin | $11,188.76 |
Read the shape of it. Nothing exotic happened — no disaster, no scope explosion, just a normal project whose fee was set by feel. The loss was not in the work; it was in the quote. And the same arithmetic runs the other way: a $9,000 fee on 40 hours at the same rate, with $100 of expenses and no subcontractor, costs $4,940 to deliver; $261 leaves in card fees before the money lands, and what arrives keeps $3,799 — a 43.5% margin and an effective $198.61 an hour. The difference between those two projects is not effort or talent. It is whether the fee was ever checked against the hours.
How project profitability works
- Your hours are a cost, and they are priced first. Time cost is your hours, grown by the buffer, multiplied by your cost rate — the rate the hourly rate calculator builds from your income, tax, expenses and billable capacity. That rate is what an hour of you has to fetch before the business keeps anything. Skip this line and every project looks profitable, because the biggest cost in it was never charged.
- Then the money costs. The subcontractor’s fee and the project’s own expenses — the stock, the software, the travel that exists only because this job does. Our guide to hiring your first subcontractor runs this same arithmetic from the other side: the margin between a client rate and a subcontractor’s fee, after your management time and a fix-up allowance are costed in. Read together, the two pages agree — which is the point of costing both ways.
- The buffer is honesty, not padding. Projects rarely take the hours you first guess: revisions run long, answers arrive late, the second call uncovers the real brief. The buffer prices that ordinary drift before it happens. It is not a pot for scope additions — extras are agreed and priced before they start, which is exactly the discipline our guide to handling scope creep sets out.
- Three readings of the same project. Profit is what survives — what actually arrives, after the payment fee, minus every cost, shown plainly even when it is negative. Margin is profit as a share of what arrives, the figure that lets projects of different sizes be compared. And the effective hourly rate — what arrives divided by the hours the project actually takes — is what the project really paid you per hour of your life, set against the rate you believed you were charging. The gap between those two rates is where optimistic estimates live. The quick two-number version of the margin reading alone — one line, one price, one costs figure, run both ways — is the margin calculator.
- Before the quote, and after it. The project price calculator works forwards, before anything is quoted: honest hours per part, a risk buffer and expenses, built into a fee with a walk-away floor beneath it. This page works backwards, on a fee that already exists — quoted, agreed or already invoiced — and asks whether it survives the hours. Use the first to set the number and this one to check it, especially before a discount is offered in a negotiation. And for the same question at the scale of a month rather than a project, the break-even calculator divides the whole month’s costs by the unit you sell.
- Where the money leaks, in the order it usually leaks. First, unbilled hours — the revisions and extras absorbed without a price; the scope creep cost calculator isolates that one leak while a project is still live. Second, expenses absorbed silently — the stock, the tool subscription, the subcontractor’s extra hour that came out of your pocket because passing it on felt petty; this page charges them all, which is the whole argument for charging them anywhere. Third, the payment fee — the cut that leaves before the money reaches you, invisible precisely because you never held it. It is charged on this page for the same reason your hours are: a cost you cannot see is a cost you cannot price.
A project that lands at exactly zero is not automatically a mistake. Taken knowingly — for the case study it produces, the portfolio piece, the door it opens — it can be a fair trade, and our guide to writing a freelance case study shows how to bank that value instead of letting it evaporate. What this calculator removes is the accident: the break-even project you believed was earning, discovered in December. And when the project is finished and the hours are spent rather than estimated, the effective hourly rate calculator runs the same honesty as an audit — the fee you actually received divided by every hour the work really took, revisions, calls and rework included, against the rate you targeted.
What to do with the answer. A red result is a pricing instruction, not a verdict on you: reprice the shape, reshape it — our guide to productizing a freelance service turns a leaky project into a package with the hours counted in advance — or decline the shape the next time it is offered, which is the decision the client list audit exists to make. A healthy result is data too: the project shape that clears your target margin is your best product, and the solo quarterly business review is where that gets noticed, named and repeated. Run the page at invoice time, while the hours are still countable from the record rather than reconstructed from memory in December. And one honesty note: the profit here is before tax. Your cost rate already carries tax, expenses and unpaid time inside it — which is exactly why it is the rate doing the costing — and the tax set-aside calculator is where the tax share gets put aside as the money lands.