Billable hours calculator
Work out what your billable hours are actually worth per week, per month and per year — and what the half hour you keep forgetting to log is costing you. Free, instant, no signup.
The rest goes to admin, sales, invoicing and email — real work that no client pays for.
52 minus holiday, sick days and the weeks between contracts.
$114,240
billable a year, from 28.0 h of billable work a week.
$2,380
$9,520
28.0 h
of 40.0 h worked
1344.0 h
What forgotten time costs you a year
The quick call, the “two-minute” fix, the context switch back into a client file. Billable work that never reaches a timer is billable work that never reaches an invoice.
$850
$10,200
8.9% of what you bill
The revenue leak calculator takes this further and models the whole gap, including teams.
The formula
billable hours / week = hours per day × days per week × billable share
per week = billable hours / week × hourly rate
per year = per week × weeks worked per year
per month = per year ÷ 12
example: 8 × 5 × 70% = 28 h → 28 × $85 = $2,380/week → × 48 = $114,240/year
Billable hours are not the hours you work
A billable hour is an hour a client has agreed to pay for. Everything else you do to keep the business running — pitching, scoping, invoicing, chasing payment, bookkeeping, learning the tool the next project needs — is real work that produces no line on an invoice. That gap is why a 40-hour week almost never produces 40 billable hours, and why your effective hourly earnings are always lower than your quoted rate.
The distinction matters when you set a rate. If you need to earn a certain amount a year and you plan it against worked hours rather than billable hours, you will land short by exactly the size of your non-billable load. Billable vs non-billable hours covers where the line usually falls.
What billable share is realistic?
Most people guess high. There is no study that measures freelancers specifically, so treat any number as a reference point rather than a benchmark. The closest hard figure comes from professional services firms: SPI Research’s 2025 Professional Services Maturity Benchmark put average billable utilization at 68.9% for 2024, against a 75% optimal threshold. Parakeeto’s agency guidance puts healthy agency-wide net utilization lower still, at 50–60%.
For a solo freelancer, somewhere in the 60–75% band is a sustainable place to plan from. Above 80% is possible but leaves no slack for sales or growth, and anything close to 100% is almost always a measurement problem rather than an achievement — the non-billable time exists, it just is not being recorded. Billable utilization rate has the full working and the sources.
Getting the input number right
Every figure on this page depends on one input you have to measure rather than estimate: how many hours you actually billed. Reconstructed from memory on invoice day, that number is always low, because the short interruptions are the first thing you forget and they add up to the slider above. How to track billable hours covers the habit, and choosing a billable hours tracker covers the tools. If the totals here look like a business worth running properly, pricing is two plans and a 14-day trial.
Stop estimating the input
BillNotch records your working day in the background, sorts it into client projects, and keeps a running billable total that is ready to send as an invoice. The hours you would have forgotten are already on the sheet.
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