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Free Consulting Rate Calculator — find what you actually need to charge.

Most consultants undercharge because they price off a salary, not a business. Enter your target income, your overhead, and the hours you can really bill — and watch the hourly and day rate that supports all of it appear beside you. No signup, no email gate.

  • Free — no account, no email
  • Accounts for overhead, margin & non-billable time
  • Hourly, day & blended rates
$
Non-billable time25%

Admin, prospecting, and learning — work you do but can't bill.

Overhead20%

Operating costs as a share of revenue — software, insurance, workspace.

Target profit margin15%

Profit built in on top of paying yourself — your buffer and growth.

Recommended rate

$205/ hour

or about $1,641 a day

To take home $120,000 a year at 25 billable hours a week, you need to bill about $205/hour — roughly $5,128 a week across 900 billable hours a year.

Your rate ladder

Hourly$205
Half day (4 hrs)$821
Full day (8 hrs)$1,641
Week (25 hrs)$5,128

Where each billed hour goes

Your pay

$133

Overhead

$41

Profit margin

$31

Pricing on value, not time?

This rate is your floor. When you price an engagement on the outcome instead of the clock, that floor maps to roughly $205–$308 an hour-equivalent — the same work, priced for the result it delivers.

How to price yourself like a business, not a salary

The most common mistake independent consultants make is dividing a desired salary by a full year of working hours and calling it a rate. It feels logical and it’s almost always too low. A salaried employee has paid leave, employer-covered taxes, equipment, software, and a manager filling their calendar. As a consultant you carry all of that yourself — and you can only bill a fraction of your week. A rate that ignores those realities quietly funds your client’s business at the expense of your own.

What goes into a defensible rate

The calculator builds your rate from six inputs. Each one moves the number for a reason:

Desired annual income

The pre-tax income you want the work to pay you. Everything else is sized around this — it’s the only number that should reflect what you actually want to earn.

Billable hours and weeks

How many hours you can realistically bill in a normal week, and how many weeks you work once leave and slow spells are taken out. Be honest here — optimism is what makes rates too low.

Non-billable time

The share of your working time that can’t be invoiced: admin, prospecting, proposals, and learning. For most solo consultants this is 20–40% of the week, and ignoring it is the single biggest cause of undercharging.

Overhead

Your operating costs as a share of revenue — software, insurance, a workspace, tools, subcontractors. The rate scales with the real cost of running your practice.

Profit margin

A buffer built in on top of paying yourself, so the business can absorb a slow month, reinvest, and grow rather than just break even.

Consulting rate questions, answered

How do I set my consulting rate?

Start from the income you want the work to pay you, then work backwards. Add the operating costs you carry (your overhead), the profit margin your business needs on top of your own pay, and the reality that not every working hour can be billed — admin, prospecting, and learning all take time you can’t invoice. Divide the revenue you need by the hours you can actually bill in a year, and you have your floor. This calculator does that arithmetic for you: enter your target income, billable hours, overhead, margin, and non-billable time, and it returns the hourly and day rate that supports all of them.

What is a blended rate?

A blended rate is a single average rate that stands in for work done at several different rates — for example, when an engagement mixes strategy time, delivery time, and junior support, each of which you might value differently. Solo consultants also use “blended” to describe the effective rate they need once non-billable time is accounted for: you may quote a day rate, but because only part of your week is billable, your true blended rate across all working hours is what has to cover the business. This calculator shows that effective number by building non-billable time directly into the recommended rate.

How do I factor overhead and taxes into my rate?

Overhead — software, insurance, a workspace, tools, subcontractors — is treated here as a percentage of revenue, so the rate scales with the cost of running your practice. Taxes are different: they come out of the income you take home, so the cleanest approach is to set your “desired annual income” to a pre-tax figure that already covers the tax you’ll owe, then let the calculator size the rate around it. Because tax rates depend heavily on your jurisdiction and business structure, confirm the exact number with an accountant — the calculator gives you a defensible starting point, not tax advice.

Should I charge by the hour or by the day?

Both come from the same underlying number. An hourly rate suits short, open-ended, or advisory work where the scope isn’t fixed; a day rate suits focused engagements where a clear block of time produces a clear outcome, and it spares both sides from counting minutes. This calculator gives you both — an hourly rate and an eight-hour day rate — from one set of inputs, so you can quote whichever fits the engagement without doing the math twice. As you grow, the strongest move is often to price on the value of the outcome rather than time at all, using these figures as your floor.

From rate to engagement

Knowing your number is the first step; putting it in front of a client with confidence is the next. Once you have a rate you trust, you can drop it straight into a statement of work with the free SOW generator, or build it into a branded proposal in ConsultBase, the client portal that helps independent consultants look like established firms.