A free, independent pricing tool built for people who sell their expertise by the hour — and need a rate grounded in reality, not guesswork.
If you have ever set your hourly rate by looking at what competitors charge on a freelance platform, you have already made a mistake. Platform averages are self-reported, skewed by geography, and tell you nothing about whether those people are actually profitable.
Your rate needs to cover your desired take-home pay, your actual business costs, your full tax burden, and the fact that you cannot bill every working hour.
RateCardPro is a rate calculator that works backward from your financial reality. You tell it how much you want to earn, what your business costs are, what tax rate you face, and how many hours you can realistically bill. It returns the minimum hourly rate that satisfies all four constraints — and a recommended rate with a 20% margin for profit and resilience.
We provide over 100 profession-specific versions of this calculator, each pre-filled with realistic defaults for that field.
RateCardPro uses a cost-plus pricing methodology. We start with what it actually costs you to operate and build upward from there.
Gross Required = (Net Income + Expenses) ÷ (1 − Tax Rate)
Billable Hours = Weeks × Hours/Week × Utilization %
Minimum Rate = Gross Required ÷ Billable Hours
Independent consultants, fractional executives, technical specialists, and creative strategists across more than 100 industries — from cloud architecture and cybersecurity to brand positioning and fractional CFO work.