Freelance web designers often quote a flat site price that, once discovery, revisions, content wrangling, and launch support are counted, pays far below the sticker. This calculator works backward from your target take-home to the hourly floor your project prices must clear.
| 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 | $30/hr |
| Common average | $65/hr |
| Specialized / certified high | $150/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 (design and prototyping tools, a website builder or CMS license, stock photos and fonts, demo hosting, a portfolio site), 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 web designers commonly bill $30–$150/hour, with mid-level around $58 and senior designers above $100. Most sell project packages, but set your hourly floor here so a fixed site price doesn't quietly slip below cost once revisions pile up.
Estimate total hours for the site — discovery, design, build, content, launch — multiply by your required hourly rate, and add a revision buffer and a margin. A cost-plus quote with overhead keeps fixed prices profitable.
Waiting on client copy and images is real, unbilled time. Set milestones in your contract, and lower the billable percentage above so your rate absorbs the dead time projects routinely accumulate.