Translator hourly rate calculator
This free calculator works out the hourly rate a translator should charge, starting from the income you need — not from a per-word rate copied off a job board. It adds the CAT tool, reference and training costs translation quietly carries, divides by the hours you actually spend translating, and then converts the result back into per-word terms, because that is how most translation work is really bought.
The pricing reality for freelance translators
Translation is mostly bought by the source word, with hourly billing for revision, proofreading and post-editing, and flat fees for small jobs. Each model hides a different cost. Per-word pricing hides the text itself: a clean marketing page and a dense patent specification both count words, but one can take three times as long per thousand words as the other. Hourly work hides the preparation — the style guide, the reference files, the terminology decisions — that happens before the first sentence is billable. Flat fees for small jobs hide the admin, which is the same size whether the job is 200 words or 2,000.
That invisible work is where translator rates quietly fall apart. Terminology research, building and maintaining translation memories and glossaries, queries back and forth with the client, formatting, the final QA pass, quoting a dozen small jobs to win six of them — none of it is counted in a word rate, and for many translators it eats a third or more of the week. That is why the preset below starts billable time at 60% rather than the 100% a per-word rate silently assumes: the words are the product, but they are not the whole job.
The numbers below are starting presets, not a survey: a $50,000 target income, $3,000 a year of expenses — a realistic shape for a CAT tool licence, reference and terminology subscriptions, professional association dues and training — and 60% billable time. With those starting numbers the calculator lands near $67 an hour. Change any figure to match your own books; the point is not the preset, it is that every cost gets counted before the per-word rate is quoted, not discovered after the deadline.
Your numbers — translator 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 translators forget to put in the rate
- CAT tool licences. Your translation environment renews every year, and so do the upgrades that keep it compatible with client files. It is a standing cost of being able to take the work at all.
- Reference and terminology resources. Specialist dictionaries, terminology databases and reference subscriptions are what separate a specialist rate from a generalist one — and they are bought with your money, not the client's.
- Translation-memory upkeep. Aligning old translations, cleaning memories and maintaining glossaries pays off on every future job, which is exactly why it never appears on any single invoice.
- Training and credentials. Association dues, certification and the courses that keep a specialism current — legal, medical, technical — are professional costs that arrive whether the month was busy or quiet.
- Small-job admin. A 200-word job still needs quoting, setup, delivery and invoicing. A minimum fee anchored to your hourly rate is how that admin stops being unpaid.
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 translator presets — four weeks off, 40 hours a week, 60% billable — that is 1,152 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 translation.
Next, work out what those hours must bring in. Add your desired income and your annual business expenses together — $53,000 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 $70,667 — then add your profit margin to reach $77,733 and divide by your billable hours. That final number, $67, is the rate below which the year stops adding up.
Now convert it back into the unit clients buy. If you translate a straightforward text at about 300 words an hour, $67 an hour works out at roughly $0.22 a word. At 250 words an hour it is about $0.27 a word, and on dense technical text at 200 words an hour, about $0.34. These are conversions of this example, not market rates — the point is the direction of travel. Take any per-word offer, multiply it by your realistic words per hour for that text type, and check the result against your hourly floor: a job at $0.10 a word and 300 words an hour pays $30 an hour, however impressive the word count looks.
Translator 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, business coach rates and illustrator rates, or start from the general freelance hourly rate calculator.