The Get Paid Kit · Planning

Free vacation fund calculator

Freelancers don’t get paid leave. A week off costs twice — the trip itself, and the billings that never happen — and most people only budget for the first. This calculator prices the whole break: the revenue your weeks off remove, the costs that keep arriving while you are gone, and whatever the break itself costs, then works the total back into the monthly saving that makes the break free when it arrives. On the defaults below, two weeks at 20 billable hours and $95 an hour removes $3,800 of billings; add $1,450 of costs that don’t take a holiday and a $1,200 trip, and the break costs $6,450 — $1,075 a month for six months, 13.1% of an average month’s billings. It is not the emergency fund, which exists for breaks you didn’t choose, and not income smoothing, which evens out pay while you work. This one funds an absence you planned. Put your own break in.

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 planned break

Weeks off planned the whole break, weekends inside it included — the revenue stops for all of it

Months until the break the runway you have to fund it — longer runways carry smaller shares

Billable hours per week the hours you would have sold in each of those weeks — your real billable week, not your full working week

Your hourly rate ($) the rate those billable hours would have earned

Costs per week that continue while you’re away ($) rent, software, subscriptions, insurance — the costs that don’t take a holiday

Trip budget ($) what the break itself spends — travel, stays, food, the lot; zero is fine, a staycation still costs the income

Why a weekly figure for the continuing costs? Because the monthly bills are easier to see that way once they are divided by the weeks they cover — take a month of rent, tools and subscriptions, divide by 4.33, and that is the amount quietly leaving for every week you are gone. If the month itself is what you are unsure of, the break-even calculator builds it from the full cost list.

The saving that funds it

—

Enter the break you are planning.

—The same saving expressed weekly — the rhythm most income actually arrives in.

—What each day of the break actually costs, all three parts priced in.

Billable revenue the break removes	—
Costs that continue while you’re away	—
Trip budget	—
Total cost of the break	—
Months until the break	—
Monthly saving needed	—
Weekly saving	—
Your average month’s billings	—
Saving as a share of billings	—
Cost per day of the break	—

Enter the break — its length, its runway and what it spends — and this line reads the saving back to you.

Worked example

A freelancer plans two weeks off, six months from now. Their billable week is 20 hours at $95, the costs that keep running come to $725 a week, and the trip itself gets a $1,200 budget. Enter those numbers above and the calculator returns exactly this:

Weeks off	2
Months until the break	6
Billable revenue the break removes (2 × 20 hrs × $95)	$3,800.00
Costs that continue (2 × $725)	$1,450.00
Trip budget	$1,200.00
Total cost of the break	$6,450.00
Monthly saving needed (6 months)	$1,075.00
Weekly saving	$248.08
Average month’s billings	$8,233.33
Saving as a share of billings	13.1%
Cost per day of the break	$460.71

Read the shape of it. The part people budget for — the trip — is the smallest of the three lines. The break costs $460.71 a day, and most of that price is invisible: billings that were never invoiced and costs that left on schedule anyway. But priced, it becomes ordinary: $1,075 a month for six months, an eighth or so of a normal month’s billings, and the break arrives already paid for. Nothing about the holiday changed. Only the months before it did.

The method

How the vacation fund works

The two costs nobody adds together. A break’s price is usually quoted as its spending — flights, stays, food — while the missing income is treated as a separate, vaguer loss. They land in the same bank account in the same weeks, so this page refuses to separate them: lost billings plus continuing costs plus the trip is the break’s real price, and it is the only figure worth saving towards. On the defaults, the trip is under a fifth of it.
Costs don’t take a holiday. Rent, software, subscriptions and insurance keep billing at the same weekly rhythm whether you are at your desk or on a beach, and a week off does not reduce them by a week. That is why they are entered weekly and multiplied by the whole break. A practice with light running costs takes cheap breaks even to expensive places; a practice carrying heavy fixed costs pays for its holidays twice over, and should know it before it books.
Separate money, separate job. Three pots get confused because all three are “savings for later.” The emergency fund covers a stop you didn’t choose — a lost client, an illness, a dry quarter. The income smoothing buffer evens out pay while you are working, absorbing the ordinary thin months. This fund covers an absence you chose and scheduled. Keep them separate: a pot borrowed across jobs quietly turns one plan into another plan’s emergency, and the planned break is always the first thing raided.
Fund it from the fat months. The saving is expressed as a share of an average month’s billings because that is the honest scale of it — 13.1% on the defaults — but it does not have to be paid evenly. Fuller months can carry double shares and thin ones none, as long as the runway total is reached; the slow season guide works the same discipline in the other direction, stocking the full months against the empty ones. What matters is that the schedule is set while the money is there to schedule.
An unfunded break is a loan from your future rate. The break will be paid for — that is not in question. Either the months before it pay, through this fund, or the months after it pay, through thinner draws, deferred costs and a pipeline that sat idle while you were gone. Pre-paying is cheaper in every way that matters: it is spread thinner, it is planned, and it arrives before the break instead of haunting the quarter after it. The calculator’s whole job is to move the payment to the side of the break where it does the least damage.

Disclaimer: This is a planning estimate for your own numbers, not financial advice. The verdict bands — a saving up to 10% of an average month’s billings reads as easily funded, up to 20% as planned and possible, beyond that as tight — are this page’s working frame, not a standard, and the right share for your practice depends on your costs, your runway and how full your months really are. The calculator does honest arithmetic on the figures you give it.

One last connection: the fund pays for the break, but the break has to survive being taken. The guide to taking time off as a freelancer covers the other half — the client notice, the cover arrangements and the return ramp — and if the saving share above comes out unaffordable at your current rate, the problem is upstream: the hourly rate calculator rebuilds the rate itself, vacation weeks included, from your income, costs and capacity.

Questions

Vacation fund calculator questions

Should I save the lost revenue too, or just the trip?+

The revenue, for most freelancers, is the bigger half — on this page’s defaults the trip is $1,200 of a $6,450 break, and the lost billings are $3,800. Save only for the trip and the break still happens; it is simply paid for afterwards, out of the first months back, when the pipeline is at its thinnest and the costs never paused. Saving the whole cost is what makes the break actually free: you come back to a practice whose income picks up where it left off, instead of one quietly servicing the holiday.

What if I take the break anyway, unfunded?+

Then the break is a loan, and the lender is your own future income. The same $6,450 comes out of the months after you return — usually as a thinner monthly draw, which is exactly the feast-and-famine pattern the income smoothing calculator exists to prevent, or as a quiet raid on the tax set-aside, which converts a holiday into a later bill. None of that makes the break wrong: rest is not optional equipment. It makes it unpriced. Take the break — but know which future month is paying for it, and choose that on purpose rather than discovering it.

Does this work for one long break or several short ones?+

Run it once per break. Each break has its own runway — the saving for a December week starts when the September one is funded, not before — and small breaks priced separately stay honest, because their lost revenue is real even when the trip itself is a train fare. For the year as a whole — how many weeks you can take before the billable year stops adding up — the utilization calculator holds the annual view. This page prices one planned absence; that one prices the calendar it sits in.