To set a freelance rate, divide the income you want plus your business expenses by the number of hours you can actually bill in a year.
TL;DR: Rate = (target income + expenses) ÷ billable hours. Bill about 50–60% of your working hours. Set yours in the freelance rate calculator.
Why billable hours are the catch
A full-time year is around 2,080 hours, but you cannot bill all of them. Sending proposals, chasing invoices, and bookkeeping take real time. Most freelancers bill 50% to 60% of their working hours.
Start by subtracting time off. Take 2,080 hours, remove three weeks of vacation and holidays (about 120 hours), and you are near 1,960 working hours. Bill 55% of that and you get roughly 1,078 billable hours a year.
Building the rate
Now add what you need. Suppose you want $70,000 in income and you have $10,000 in yearly business expenses for software, a laptop, and insurance. Your total target is $80,000.
$80,000 ÷ 1,078 billable hours = about $74 per hour
The freelance rate calculator runs this for any income, expense, and billable-hour mix.
Checking it against a salary
A useful sanity check is the 1.3 to 1.5 multiplier. A $50,000 salary is about $24 an hour over 2,080 hours. Multiply by 1.4 and you land near $34 an hour as a floor. That premium covers the benefits and downtime an employer no longer pays for.
For a day rate, multiply your hourly rate by the hours in a typical billed day. At $74 an hour, a 7-hour billed day is about $518.
These are target-rate estimates to help you price work, not tax filing or accounting advice.