How to Price Your Own Work

Every number in self-employment looks bigger than it is. Your rate isn't salary ÷ 2,080, and a 50% markup is a 33% margin.

Working for yourself means pricing your own work, and the arithmetic is not the arithmetic of a salary. It is a different set of numbers, and they share one property:

They all look bigger than they are.

The rate you can charge is not your old salary divided by working hours. The hourly your side hustle appears to pay is not what lands in your account. A 50% markup is not a 50% margin. Every tool here exists because the intuitive version of the number is wrong in the same direction — optimistic.

Your rate is not salary ÷ 2,080

This is the first and most expensive mistake, and the Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator exists to show its size.

Take a $60,000 target. Divide by the standard 2,080 working hours and you get $28.85 an hour. That number feels reasonable, so people charge something near it.

The real figure is $83.07 — 2.88 times higher.

The gap is not greed. It is everything a salary quietly covered:


Hours you work in a year	1,840
Hours you can actually bill	1,104
Hours you work but cannot bill	736
Business expenses	$6,000
Tax to set aside	$25,714

736 unbillable hours is the part people miss — selling, quoting, invoicing, admin, the work you do that never appears on a timesheet. At 60% billable, which is a normal figure, you are paid for well under two-thirds of your working life and the rate has to carry the rest.

If every hour were billable you would need $49.84. That number is worth knowing precisely because it is unreachable.

What your side hustle actually pays

The Side Hustle Hourly Profit Calculator does the same job for smaller, messier work — and the gap is proportionally worse.

$800 of revenue over 30 hours looks like $26.67 an hour. After the platform's 10%, $250 of direct costs and tax, it is $11.75.

The headline overstates it by 127%. And against a $15 hourly wage, the hustle is paying 78% of the job you could have taken instead.

You keep 44 cents of every dollar of revenue. That is the number worth internalising, because revenue is what side hustles are usually discussed in.

None of that means don't do it — plenty of good reasons survive a bad hourly. It means know which number you are comparing.

A 50% markup is a 33% margin

The Profit Margin vs Markup Calculator covers the one that quietly costs money on every single sale, because the two words sound interchangeable and are not.

Markup is on cost. Margin is on price.

On a $60 cost
50% markup gives you	a 33.3% margin
To get a 50% margin you need	a 100% markup

Same intention, two different prices: $90 versus $120. A $30 difference on every unit, from one word.

The direction is consistent — markup always sounds better than the margin it delivers — so pricing from markup while thinking in margin under-prices you, permanently and invisibly.

How many you have to sell

The Break-Even Calculator answers the question that decides whether a price works at all.

At $25 a unit against $9 of variable cost, each sale contributes $16 toward your fixed costs — a 64% contribution margin. Against $4,000 of fixed costs a month:

250 units to break even
$6,250 of revenue
8.3 units a day

That last figure is the useful one. "250 units" is abstract; "eight a day, every day, before I earn anything" is a business decision you can actually make.

Contribution margin is also the number that tells you whether a discount is survivable. At $16 a unit, knocking $4 off the price does not cost you 16% — it costs you a quarter of your contribution, and pushes break-even from 250 units to 333.

Getting paid is part of pricing

The Invoice Late Fee Calculator covers the last step, and it matters more than its size suggests.

A $5,000 invoice at 18% a year, 45 days late, has accrued $110.96 — accruing at $2.47 a day. That is 1.5% a month, and 2.22% of the invoice so far.

The interest is rarely the point. A stated late fee changes when you get paid, because an invoice that costs something to ignore stops being the one at the bottom of the pile. Put the rate on the invoice before it is late, not after.

Selling the invoice instead

The Invoice Factoring Fee Calculator covers the other way out of a slow invoice: selling it to a factor and taking most of the cash now.

At a $5,000 invoice with an 80% advance and a 3% fee per 30 days, you get $4,000 up front. The fee is $150 if your customer pays in 30 days — and that is the part that reads smaller than it is, because the 3% runs per 30 days outstanding, on the whole invoice, not on the advance. At 45 days it is $225, and the $1,000 the factor held back has shrunk to $775 by the time you see the rest.

Same direction as everything else on this page: the advance rate is the number that looks like the price, and the fee clock is the number that is the price.

The through-line

The number that looks right	The number that is right
Salary ÷ 2,080 = $28.85	$83.07
Revenue ÷ hours = $26.67	$11.75
50% markup	33.3% margin

Three different tools, one habit: before you price anything, work out which of your hours, which of your dollars, and which of your bases you are actually talking about.

Each tool has a printable. The freelance rate sheet is the one to fill in first — every other decision here sits downstream of knowing what an hour of yours has to be worth.