Freelance translators usually price per word, which hides how research, formatting, glossary work, and proofreading stretch the real hours behind each project. This calculator turns the take-home you want into an hourly floor you can convert back into a per-word rate.
| Billable hours per year | — |
| Gross revenue you must bill | — |
| Estimated tax at your rate | — |
| Business expenses recovered | — |
| Resulting take-home (check) | — |
This tool does math on the numbers you enter. It is not tax or financial advice and contains no built-in tax tables — enter your own effective rate (a tax professional can help you estimate it). Figures are estimates for planning only.
| Typical low | $25/hr |
| Common average | $40/hr |
| Specialized / certified high | $90/hr |
Benchmarks are gathered from public salary and marketplace data and refreshed periodically. Treat them as orientation — your required rate from the calculator above is the number that matters for your situation.
The most common pricing mistake is dividing a target salary by 2,080 hours. That ignores three things every freelancer carries: self-employment tax, business expenses (CAT/translation-memory tools, terminology and dictionary subscriptions, a proofreading pass or peer review, professional association dues), and the large share of the week that is never billable. This calculator builds all three in, then solves for the rate that leaves you with the take-home you entered.
US freelance translators commonly bill around $25–$90/hour, though per-word pricing ($0.08–$0.30/word depending on specialization and language pair) is more common. Compute your hourly floor above, then divide by your realistic words-per-hour to sanity-check a per-word rate.
Estimate how many words you translate per hour at quality (often 300–600 for general text). Divide your required hourly rate by that throughput to get a per-word floor, then raise it for technical, legal, or medical content.
Yes — editing, formatting, and client queries are billable time that per-word quotes often ignore. Lower the billable percentage above to account for it, or add formatting and rush surcharges on top of your base rate.