The Get Paid Kit · Pricing

Free utilization calculator

Your rate is only half the equation; the other half is how much of your week anyone pays for. At $95 an hour, 24 billable hours in a 40-hour week bills $109,440 across 48 weeks. The same rate at 18 billable hours bills $82,080. Nothing about the rate changed — only the share. That share is your utilization, and it is the quiet number inside every rate on this site: the hourly rate calculator assumes a billable percentage and builds the price on top of it. This page does the opposite — it measures yours, from one real week of hours rather than a hopeful one, and prices what the gap between the assumed share and the real one is quietly worth.

Runs in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded, sent to a server or stored anywhere except this device. The figures exist only in this page. This is a planning estimate for your own numbers, not financial advice.

Your week, measured

Your rate was priced from an assumed billable share — the rate calculator builds that assumption in. This page checks the assumption against a real week, which is the only version of it that has ever invoiced anybody.

Your utilization

— of your week is billable

Enter one real week — total hours and billable hours — and the verdict appears here.

—Your annual billings now — billable hours × your rate × the weeks you work.
—The ceiling value of the unpaid hours — what a year of them would add if every one turned billable, which none ever fully does.
Hours you work in a week—
Billable hours—
Non-billable hours—
Utilization—
Annual billings now—
Ceiling value of the non-billable hours, a year—
What +5 utilization points adds, a year—

Enter a real week and this line explains how to read the ceiling figure honestly.

Worked example

A designer works a 40-hour week, of which 24 hours are billable. Their rate is $95 and they work 48 weeks a year. Enter those numbers above and the calculator returns exactly this:

Hours worked in the week40 hours
Billable hours24 hours
Non-billable hours16 hours
Utilization60.0%
Annual billings (24 × $95 × 48)$109,440.00
Ceiling value of the non-billable hours (16 × $95 × 48)$72,960.00
Five more points of utilization (2 hours a week)$9,120.00 a year
VerdictThe healthy working range

Now the busier week that leaks more. A consultant works 45 hours and bills 18 of them — 40.0% utilization. At $75 an hour for 46 weeks that bills $62,100, while the 27 non-billable hours carry a ceiling value of $93,150 — more than the billings themselves. The longer week earned less and leaked more, which is why the verdicts care about the share, not the hours. And read the ceiling the way it is labelled: five points of that week is worth $7,762.50 a year. The whole ceiling is worth nothing at all, because the hours that find the work and run the business are sitting inside it.

The method

How utilization works

  1. Measure a real week, not a hoped one. Pick an ordinary recent week and count everything: client work, admin, pitching, invoicing, revisions, learning. Billable is only what a client pays for. One honest week beats a month of estimates — and if the share surprises you, the surprise is the finding: the share your rate assumed and the share you actually run are probably two different numbers.
  2. Know where the unpaid hours go. Most non-billable time falls into four piles: finding work (pipeline, proposals, discovery calls), running the business (invoicing, admin, accounts), unpaid extras inside paid work (revisions and scope creep hiding inside fixed fees), and getting better (learning, portfolio, your own marketing). Only some of it is waste. The pipeline pile, in particular, is what makes next month’s billable hours exist.
  3. Read the ceiling as a ceiling. The ceiling value prices every non-billable hour at your full rate across the year. It is the largest the prize could ever be, printed so the scale is visible — not a promise, and not a target. The figure to act on is the five-points one: small, specific, and usually findable inside the week you already work.
  4. 100% is a burnout plan, not a target. A fully billable week has no slack in it for illness, a client leaving, a quiet month or a life. Freelancers running near it are usually underpriced rather than efficient: when every hour you have sells, the market is telling you the hours are cheap. Very high utilization is a reason to examine the rate, not to squeeze the week harder.
  5. Two levers, then re-measure. You can lift the share a few points — batch the admin, tighten the onboarding, write the scope down — or lift the rate so the same share earns more: how to raise your rates covers that conversation, and the rate calculator rebuilds the price on the share you measured here. Either way, re-measure each quarter: the quarterly business review has a rate check built for exactly this comparison, assumed share against real one.
Disclaimer: This is a planning estimate for your own numbers, not financial advice. The verdict bands are practice ranges for solo freelancers, not an industry standard or a certification; what is sustainable varies with the work, the season and the person.
Rebuild your rate on the measured share Or raise the rate instead
Questions

Utilization questions

For most solo freelancers, somewhere between 40% and 65% of working hours billable is the healthy working range — enough sold time to make the rate work, and enough unsold time to run the business that sells it. Below 40%, admin, pitching and chasing usually eat the business. Above 80% there is no slack left for finding the next client, being ill or learning anything new — and 100% is not a target at all. These are practice ranges from how solo work is actually structured, not a standard anybody certifies.
No. A week that is 100% billable has no hours in it for invoicing, finding the next project, maintaining your own systems or resting — the work that makes next month’s billable hours possible. Chasing it converts this month’s extra billings into next quarter’s empty pipeline. Treat very high utilization as pricing information instead: if clients are buying nearly every hour you have, the hours are probably priced too cheaply, and the rate is the lever — not your remaining time.
Convert unsold time into sold time, a few points at a time. Batch the admin into one block instead of scattering it through billable days. Run new projects from an onboarding checklist, so setup stops generating unpaid chaos. Put the scope in writing before work starts, so revisions stop leaking out of fixed fees unpaid. Five points on a 40-hour week is two hours — at $95 an hour across 48 weeks that is $9,120 a year — and most freelancers can find two hours of leakage long before they need to find any more hours.