The Get Paid Kit · Planning

Free project timeline estimator

Quotes fail on dates more often than on prices. A price can be negotiated; a missed date is just missed. This estimator turns your honest hours into a delivery date that survives contact with your calendar: your delivery hours, a buffer for the plan meeting reality, your real billable day — and, counted separately, the days the project spends on the client’s calendar instead of yours. On the defaults below — 40 hours, a 20% buffer, five billable hours a day, two client review rounds — a project starting Monday 2 November 2026 delivers on Thursday 26 November, and 44% of that timeline was never yours to work in. It is not the project price calculator, which is this plan’s money twin, and not the working days calculator, the raw date engine underneath: this page runs a project model on that engine. Put your own project in.

Runs in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded, sent to a server or stored anywhere except this device. The dates exist only in this page. This is a planning estimate for your own numbers, not a promise — the promise is the one you make with the date it gives you.

Your project, honestly counted

Start date the day the clock starts — usually the day the deposit clears or the brief is signed off; counting begins on the next working day, as it does on the working days calculator

Your delivery hours for the project your honest estimate of the work itself — before any buffer, and before the client’s time; the figure your retrospective on the last similar project would support

Buffer on your hours (%) the honesty dial: your estimate is a plan, and the buffer is the plan meeting reality — interruptions, the draft that comes back sideways, the small change that was always coming

Your billable hours per working day not 8 — a working day also holds meetings, admin, email and the other clients whose work shares your week; 5 is the honest default for a shared week

Wait for the client’s inputs (working days) the days before you can start properly — content, assets, access, the answers only the client has; the start date is not day one until these land

Client review rounds the rounds the agreement promises — each one moves the project onto the client’s calendar for its duration

Client days per review round (working days) their calendar, counted in working days like yours — clients review on business days too, and their clock runs at their pace, not your deadline’s

Estimate the way the last project actually went, not the way this one is supposed to go. The hours you type here are the raw material of the date you will be held to; optimism entered at this end comes out as an apology at the other.

Your delivery date

—

Enter a start date, your hours and a buffer.

—Your working days — the buffered hours at your real billable day.

—The client’s days — the input wait plus the review rounds.

—Working days in total, yours and theirs together.

—Calendar days from the start date to delivery — the span the client experiences.

Your days in green, the client’s days in amber.

Enter your hours and the split between your calendar and the client’s appears here.

Start date	—
Your hours, buffer counted	—
Your working days	—
Wait for the client’s inputs	—
Client review rounds	—
The client’s days in total	—
Total working days	—
Halfway checkpoint	—
Delivery date	—
Without the buffer it would claim	—

Enter a start date, your hours and a buffer, and this line reads the plan back to you — including whether the date is a plan or a hope.

Worked example

A 40-hour project quoted on Monday 2 November 2026: a 20% buffer, five billable hours in a working day, a two-working-day wait for the client’s content and access, and two review rounds at three working days each. Enter those numbers above and the estimator returns exactly this:

Start date	Monday 2 November 2026
Your hours, buffer counted	40 hours, 48 with the buffer
Your working days	10 working days
Wait for the client’s inputs	2 working days
Client review rounds	2 rounds × 3 days = 6 working days
The client’s days in total	8 working days
Total working days	18 working days
Halfway checkpoint	Friday 13 November 2026 (9 working days in)
Delivery date	Thursday 26 November 2026
Without the buffer it would claim	Tuesday 24 November 2026 (16 working days)

Read the split before the date. Of the 18 working days, 8 — 44% — are the client’s: two waiting for inputs, six inside review rounds. A solo who quotes this project as “about two weeks of my time” has promised a date their own calendar cannot produce, because nearly half the timeline was never theirs. And read the last row as the price of optimism: drop the buffer and the date moves two working days earlier — not because the project got faster, but because the promise stopped carrying the part of reality the buffer was holding.

The method

How the date works

Quote the date from the plan, never from the hope. Your estimate is a plan: the hours the work takes when it goes the way work goes. The buffer is where that plan meets reality — the interruption, the dependency that slips, the scope that creeps a request at a time. So the date this page returns is always the buffered one, and the unbuffered date is shown underneath it, priced as what it is: the same project with the reality removed. When the timeline goes into the project brief, it is the buffered date that belongs there — the brief is a promise other people plan around, and a promise built on the hope is how a solo ends up apologising for arithmetic.
Your days come from your real day, not the calendar’s. Buffered hours are divided by your billable hours per working day, and the result is rounded up, because a part-day of project work still occupies a day in the plan. The default day is five hours, and that is not laziness: the utilization calculator measures the share of a real week anyone actually pays for, and for most solos it lands near half to two-thirds of the hours they are awake at a desk. Quote dates from an 8-hour delivery day and every project is silently scheduled against hours that belong to meetings, admin and the other clients.
Their days are in the timeline whether you write them down or not. A project does not move while it waits: for the content, the assets and the access only the client holds, and inside every review round, when the draft sits in their inbox being read at their pace. This page counts those days on the client’s calendar — in working days, because clients review on business days too — and shows the share plainly. Build the wait into the quote and the client’s pace is part of the plan; leave it out and their ordinary three days with a draft becomes your missed deadline. The wait itself shrinks when the inputs are chased before the start, which is what the client onboarding checklist is for: the list of what you need, sent the day the project is agreed, not the day you stall.
The start date is not day one. Counting begins when the clock starts, but the work begins when the inputs land — which is why the wait is a separate input rather than a silent hope folded into the hours. If the client’s content arrives on day six of a plan that assumed day two, the honest move is not to absorb four days and deliver late with a heroic story; it is to move the date by the wait, in writing, while it is still a schedule and not yet an apology. Dates downstream of a late start are re-issued, not quietly eaten.
When the scope moves, the date is re-issued. A change agreed mid-project adds hours, and added hours are added days. The discipline matches the brief’s: when the work changes, the document changes — a version two of the brief, with the new scope and the new date this estimator produces from it, sent before the extra work starts. A date that never moves while the project grows is not a stable date; it is a debt accumulating interest, and it is collected, with the apology, at delivery.
One engine, one convention. Underneath the project model sits the working days calculator’s arithmetic, unchanged: Monday to Friday count, weekends are stepped over, and counting starts on the next working day after the start date. The two pages can never disagree by a day, because they are the same count. Public holidays are not modelled — they vary by country and year, and a date computed from somebody else’s calendar is quietly wrong — so add a weekday holiday inside your span to the wait or the review days and watch the delivery move, exactly as the working days page moves it.

Scope: This estimator counts Monday-to-Friday working days only. It does not know any country’s public holidays, your other clients’ demands on the same days, or the subcontractor who has not replied yet; the buffer and the inputs are where those realities are entered, honestly, by you. Dates are computed locally, in your browser, from the numbers you enter.

Read it beside its siblings. The project price calculator is the same honesty pointed at money: honest hours, a risk buffer, a figure you can defend. The meeting cost calculator shows where the hours that are not in your billable day actually go. And the working days calculator remains the raw tool — a count of days into a date, or two dates into a count — for every promise that is a count rather than a project.

Questions

Project timeline estimator questions

Why only 5 billable hours in a working day?+

Because the 8-hour day is a fiction for a solo. Of the hours between sitting down and standing up, some go to meetings — the meeting cost calculator prices that habit on its own page — some to admin, email and invoicing, and some to the other clients whose work shares your week. What is left for this project is your real billable day, and quoting dates from 8 while living at 5 is how hard-working people miss deadlines. Set the figure to your own honest number: if this project genuinely gets 7 hours of every day, use 7. The arithmetic does not care, as long as the input is the day you actually have.

The client wants it faster. What actually works?+

Three honest levers, and a fourth with a price. You can raise your billable hours per day for a stretch — finite, and borrowed from somewhere. The client can shorten their side: fewer review rounds, faster decisions — their share of the timeline is theirs to shrink. Or the scope can shrink to fit the date: a smaller project honestly agreed, not the same project squeezed. What is not a lever is deleting the buffer and hoping; that changes the promise, not the project. The fourth lever is a rush fee — faster costs more, priced openly — which is what the rush fees guide sets out.

What about weekends — and public holidays?+

The engine counts Monday to Friday, the same convention as the working days calculator, and it does not model any country’s public holidays: they vary by place and year, and a date computed from the wrong calendar is worse than one computed from none. If a holiday falls inside your span, add a working day to the count and watch the date move. Weekends are the same question in the other direction. If you genuinely work Saturdays, that is a choice to state in the quote — this project includes Saturday working — not a habit to bake silently into every date you promise, because the first week you stop, every live deadline moves.