Freelance Editor Hourly Rate Calculator

Getting your rate takes six quick entries. The tool works backward from the pay you want to keep, adds your costs and tax, then divides by the hours you can really bill.

1. Type the annual income you want to take home after tax and business costs.
2. Type your yearly business expenses, such as software, hardware, insurance and marketing.
3. Type your tax rate as a percent. Many freelancers set aside 25 to 30% for income and self-employment tax.
4. Type the weeks you take off each year, your work hours per week and the share of those hours clients pay for.
5. Press Calculate, or press Enter. Your hourly rate appears first and large, with the gross revenue, billable hours and monthly income below, plus the step-by-step math. Press Reset to clear the form and start over.

Three short formulas turn your income goal into an hourly rate. Each one fixes a mistake freelancers make when they divide a salary by 2,080 hours.

Gross revenue: Gross revenue = (Take-home income + Business expenses) / (1 - Tax rate). The tax rate is a decimal, so a 25% rate means dividing by 0.75. This is the money your editing work must bring in before tax and costs.

Billable hours: Billable hours = (52 - Weeks off) × Hours per week × Billable %. A full-time editor who works 40 hours a week, takes 4 weeks off and bills 60% of the time has only 1,152 billable hours a year, not 2,080.

Hourly rate: Hourly rate = Gross revenue / Billable hours. Divide the money you must earn by the hours you can sell, and you get the lowest rate that still meets your goal.

An editor wants to take home $60,000 a year. Business expenses run $6,000, the tax rate is 25%, she takes 4 weeks off, works 40 hours a week and bills 60% of her time. Here is exactly what the calculator does.

1. Add income and expenses: $60,000.00 + $6,000.00 = $66,000.00.
2. Adjust for tax: $66,000.00 / (1 - 0.25) = $66,000.00 / 0.75 = $88,000.00 of gross revenue needed.
3. Billable hours = (52 - 4) × 40 × 60% = 48 × 40 × 0.60 = 1,152 hours.
4. Hourly rate = $88,000.00 / 1,152 = $76.39 per hour.

As a check, Billazz publishes the same three-step method with a worked example of $113,333 / 1,152 hours = $98.38 per hour. The method matches, only the numbers differ.

Most editors work far more hours than they bill. Admin, pitching, invoicing, revisions that were never quoted and time between projects all eat into the week. FreelanceRateSuite and Billazz both put the typical billable share at 50 to 70% of work hours, and CreatorCalc notes that creative freelancers usually bill only 20 to 28 hours a week.

That gap is why dividing a salary by 2,080 hours underprices you. A $60,000 salary divided by 2,080 gives $28.85 an hour, but the worked example above shows the same editor needs $76.39 an hour once tax, expenses, time off and non-billable work are counted. The 2,080-hour shortcut ignores every cost of running the business.

Track your time for two or three weeks if you do not know your billable share. Log every hour, mark the ones a client pays for, and use the real percent. A small change moves the rate a lot. Raising the billable share from 50% to 60% on the worked example cuts the needed rate from $91.67 to $76.39 an hour.

Your calculated rate is a floor, not a market price. Compare it with what editors at your level charge, then set your rate at or above the floor. The table below shows typical 2026 ranges from the FreelanceCalc rate guide.

Our worked example at $76.39 an hour sits in the middle of the mid-level range, which fits an editor with a few years of experience. If your floor lands above the top of your range, you need more billable hours, lower costs or a higher-value niche, not a lower rate.

The first mistake is forgetting tax. Self-employed editors pay income tax plus self-employment tax, so a 25% combined rate is common and 30% is safer in many states. Leaving tax out of the formula is the fastest way to take home less than you planned.

The second mistake is counting every work hour as billable. Admin, marketing and unpaid revisions are real work, and the rate has to carry them. If you bill 60% of your hours, the other 40% is paid for by the rate on the 60%.

The third mistake is never raising the rate. Costs and tax rise every year, so review your rate at least once a year and after every big project. Check the result against our hourly to salary calculator to see what the rate means as a yearly salary, and use our virtual assistant hourly rate calculator or freelance graphic designer quote calculator to compare how other freelancers price the same kind of work.

This calculator gives an estimate for planning and is for informational purposes only, not financial or tax advice. Actual tax depends on your income, your state and your filing status. See our disclaimer.