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Freelance rate calculator for web developers
Work out the hourly and day rate your business needs, from what you want to earn and what it costs to run.
Change the figures to yours. The working shows underneath, line by line, so you can see where every pound of the rate comes from. All figures are before tax.
£42.64 an hour
£298 for a 7-hour day
How the rate is worked out
How much should a freelance web developer charge per hour?
Enough to cover what you want to earn, what the business costs, and the hours nobody pays for. With the example figures, that’s £42.64.
Start with the money. You want to earn £40,000 a year. The laptop, software, AI tools, insurance and accountant cost another £3,683. Add 10 per cent for quiet months and new kit, and the business has to bring in £48,051.
Then the hours. Not every hour you work is an hour you can bill. In a 35-hour week, about 10 hours go on admin, chasing leads, learning and fixing things for free. Over 46 working weeks, that’s 483 hours unpaid out of 1,610. You bill the other 1,127.
Divide £48,051 by 1,127 hours and you get £42.64 an hour, or £298 for a seven-hour day.
That’s a floor, not a market rate. If clients in your niche pay more, charge more. If they won’t pay the floor, the job is too big for their budget, and the answer is a smaller job.
Freelancer Pricing Calculator · Dev Edition
Your rate is the start. Know your floor before you say a number.
The Chapter 10 pricing method as a working spreadsheet, for Excel and Google Sheets.
The free calculator gives you a rate. The workbook takes that rate and prices a website phase by phase, sets the floor, rounds it up to a quote, splits out the deposit and VAT, and tells you exactly how far below the floor a price is before you send it.
What it usually gets quoted
An eight-page small business site. £1,200, picked because it felt like a number the client wouldn’t refuse.
Honest hours. Add 50 per cent because the estimate is wrong. Multiply by your minimum rate.
What the floor says
The gap
How to price a website project as a freelancer
Count the hours, add half again, multiply by your rate. For the eight-page site, the number that felt safe was £2,574 too low.
An honest estimate for that site is 59 hours, from the scoping call to handover. Your estimate is wrong, because everyone’s is, so add 50 per cent: 88.5 hours. At £42.64 an hour, the floor is £3,773.64. Round it up and the quote is £3,800.
At £1,200, those 88.5 hours pay £13.56 an hour, before tax and before the costs of running the business.
Nobody sets out to work for that. It happens because the price is chosen first and the hours are discovered later: eight pages of content entered at 45 minutes each, two rounds of revisions, the testing on a phone nobody mentioned. Each one is small. Together they’re the difference between a job that pays and one that costs you a month of evenings.
The calculator reverses the order. You count the hours, it sets the floor, and only then do you choose the price.
If the quote falls below the floor, cut the scope. Do not cut the rate.
Inside the workbook
Blue cells are yours. Green cells are the answers.
Nine sheets, connected. Change your costs once and every rate, quote and package updates.
The figures on this page are the workbook’s own example. Replace them with yours before you quote anyone.
Dev expenses
What the business costs before you earn anything.
Laptop spread over the years you keep it, software, AI tools, insurance, accountant. The example comes to £3,683 a year.
Main calculator
Your minimum rate, worked out rather than guessed.
The same sum as the free calculator above, saved with your figures and feeding every other sheet. It also tells you when your required revenue passes the VAT registration threshold.
Web project quote
Ten phases, × 1.5, one number for the job.
From the scoping call to handover, revisions included. It sets the floor, rounds up to a quote, adds VAT only if you’re registered and splits out the 50 per cent deposit.
Care plan
Maintenance priced at your rate, not as a hosting add-on.
Two and a half hours of updates and support, hosting marked up rather than given away: £125 a month per site. Eight clients at that price make £1,000 a month.
Packages, undercharging, price increases
What your current prices actually pay.
Three tiers priced from hours. A check on what a past job really paid per hour. And how many fewer projects the same revenue takes after a price rise.
What it won’t do
It gives you a floor, not a market rate.
It can’t know what clients in your niche pay. If they’ll pay more than the floor, charge more. The floor is where you stop, not where you start.
It isn’t tax advice. It handles VAT on a quote and warns you near the threshold, but your tax position is between you, HMRC and ideally an accountant.
It’s built for one person. A studio needs a licence for each person who uses it. And it’s a spreadsheet: no account, no subscription, nothing to log into.
If you’ve read the book
Same method as the free pricing sheet. More of the arithmetic done.
The pricing sheet in the appendix is six lines you fill in by hand, and it stays free. The calculator starts a step earlier, by working out your minimum rate from your real costs. It carries on past the quote into the deposit, VAT, care plans and packages.
If you haven’t read Chapter 10 yet, read it first. The spreadsheet is faster with the reasoning behind it, and the reasoning is free.
Questions
Before you buy.
How much should a beginner freelance web developer charge?
No less than the calculator above gives you. Being new doesn’t make the laptop cheaper or the unpaid hours fewer. It just makes them easier to forget.
Take the eight-page site quoted at £1,900. Spread over 88.5 hours, that looks like £21.47 an hour. Business costs of £3,683 a year, spread over the 1,127 hours you can bill, take £3.27 out of every one, which leaves £18.20.
Not every hour you work is an hour you can bill. In a 35-hour week, about 10 hours go on admin, chasing leads, learning and fixing things for free. You bill the other 24.5 hours. At £18.20 each, that’s £445.90 for the week. Divide that by the 35 hours you actually worked and you’ve earned £12.74 an hour.
The National Living Wage has been £12.71 since April 2026. Quote £1,900 for that site and you’re working for minimum wage, without the pension or sick pay. Quote £1,200 and it’s £7.20.
What do I get?
- The Excel workbook, which also imports into Google Sheets
- A three-page quick-start guide (PDF)
- A five-minute video walkthrough of the example
- A licence for one person, for unlimited clients and quotes
Why pay £29 when the rate calculator is free?
The free calculator stops at the rate. The workbook saves your figures and carries the rate into everything you send a client: the phase-by-phase quote, the floor warning, the deposit, VAT, care plans and packages.
I’m not VAT registered. Does that matter?
No. Set VAT registered to No and your quotes carry no VAT, which is what the book says to do. The sheet warns you if your required revenue passes the registration threshold.
Can I change the phases and figures?
Yes. Every blue cell is yours: rename phases, change hours, swap in your own costs. Leave the green cells alone, because they’re the formulas.
What if it doesn’t work?
It’s an instant download, so checkout asks you to agree to immediate access, which ends the usual 14-day cancellation period. If the file is faulty, email hello@brieftoinvoice.com and I’ll fix it or refund you.
Freelancer Pricing Calculator · Dev Edition
Count the hours. Set the floor. Then choose the price.
£29, one-off. Excel workbook, quick-start guide and a five-minute walkthrough. One licence, unlimited clients and quotes.