Calculating Day Rate for Freelancers

	B	C	D	F
1	Museum/ Heritage Learning Day Rate Calculator
2	Note 1:	This day rate calculator was created by Tom Briggs and is based on Paddy McNulty's advice given during GEM NE's training session ""How Much!" Know Your Value - Pay and Conditions of Freelancing", 12/01/2022.
3	Note 2:	You'll need to make your own copy of this sheet in order to use it. Alternatively, there's a javascript version that doesn't require saving your own copy to use. You can find that here.
4	Note 3:	Change numbers in the cells that are shaded green. Leave everything else alone (unless you like playing with spreadsheets, of course).
5
6
7	Fill in this section first	Salary (before tax, pension, etc)	£45,000.00	You could think of this as an equivalent salary that you'd be happy to work for if you were to go back to working for someone else.
8		Projected costs & expenses	£3,000.00	If you were working for someone else you'd expect things like insurance and work expenses to be covered by them, so estimate how much extra you'd need to cover these as a solo act.
9		Desired reserves/profit	£10,000.00	Building a business costs money; fallow and rainy days can pop up at any time, or you might just want to be able to put something in your savings. How much do you think is right?
10		Target Income	£58,000.00	This is simply the previous three numbers added together, and gives some idea of what someone else may spend on you if you were working for them full-time.
11
12	Then fill in this section	Working days	150.00	According to Paddy, freelancers get about 150 days of paid work per year: this needs to cover all of the income that you've stated in the cells above. Feel free to change this if you win more or fewer proposals (on average) in a year.
13	Then fill in this section	Holiday/sick days	28.00	Everyone gets ill from time to time, and we're all entitled to days off. These need to be covered financially, though, so we've got to include them in our calculation. Paddy suggested 28 days per year is reasonable, but you may want to give yourself more holiday, or provide a larger buffer for sick days (or reduce these if you're only freelancing for part of the time).
14		Final day rate	£458.84	This is your target daily rate to charge if you want to reach your target income over the working, holiday and sick days entered above.
15
16	Bonus section!	Working hours per day (inc. breaks)	8	A standard working day is around 8 hours long. If you're happy to work longer hours, or if you want to work shorter days feel free to change this!
17	Bonus section!	Final hourly rate	£57.36	If you're not working a full day, e.g. you're delivering a session at a conference, or doing bits of work here and there, this is how much you should be charging per hour. Be aware that you should probably include time to prepare, travel, set up, etc when you're calculating what to charge in order to hit your targets set above.
18
19
20	If you find this useful, consider tipping me!			Ko-fi.com/teakayb
21	Get in touch with requests or issues (or commissions!):			https://www.linkedin.com/in/tkbriggs/
22	This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100