A pre-tax rate planning tool for contractors

Know the rate
your numbers require.

Account for compensation, benefits, overhead and reserve. Then connect your annual cost base to realistic billable hours and the revenue margin you choose.

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Your pre-tax hourly rate floor

Make every assumption count.

Pre-tax planning only. This calculator does not evaluate taxes, employment status, worker classification or whether a corp-to-corp arrangement is appropriate. Your inputs do not establish a market rate or guarantee work.

Every amount and assumption is required. Enter 0 explicitly for annual costs you intentionally exclude. Margin means a share of revenue, not a percentage added to costs. No job listings, applications or resumes are collected here.

Scenario

Scenario label

Use a short label without personal, client or employer details.

Currency for every amount

All amounts use this currency. No conversion is performed.

Annual cost base

Use annual amounts, with a decimal point and no currency symbols or commas. Up to 6 decimal places. Enter 0 for an intentionally excluded item.

Annual owner compensation

Annual benefits cost

Annual business overhead

Annual reserve contribution

Use your own compensation target and cost assumptions. Avoid counting the same expense or reserve in more than one category. No tax rate or withholding is calculated.

Billable time

Weeks off per year

Available hours per working week

The model uses 52 weeks. Enter 0–51 weeks off and more than 0 through 80 available hours per working week. Fractional values are allowed.

Billable utilization percentage

More than 0 through 100. The share of available hours you expect to invoice. Account for sales, administration, gaps and other nonbillable work in this assumption.

Revenue margin

Target margin percentage

Enter 0–95. Margin is the share of revenue remaining after your entered cost base. For a 20% margin, costs use 80% of revenue: required revenue = costs ÷ 0.80. This is not a 20% cost markup.

Inputs remain in this page. No automatic saving, uploads, market-rate requests or AI processing. Leaving or reloading can lose the scenario.

Rate-floor reportPre-tax scenario

Ready for your inputs

Trace the rate to your plan.

Enter annual costs, available time, billable utilization and a revenue margin to see the rate implied by those assumptions.

Sum the annual cost base.
Allow for nonbillable time.
Apply margin and round the hourly floor upward.

Modeled pre-tax hourly floor · rounded up to a cent

Annual cost inputs

Annual cost components entered for this scenario
Amount	Cost component

Hours and revenue

Billable hours are an assumption, not a forecast of available contracts. Required revenue includes your target margin above the entered cost base.

Calculation trail

Money uses decimal calculations. The hourly rate rounds upward to a whole cent so ordinary rounding cannot put it below the modeled floor.

Assumptions and limits

This is a pre-tax planning aid, not a market quote, tax or worker-classification opinion, or guarantee of income or placement. Review your own financial and legal circumstances separately.

The download includes your scenario label, cost inputs and working assumptions. Store and share it with care.

A rate with an explanation

Billable time carries the cost base.

Start with annual costs.

Include the categories relevant to your plan. A blank value blocks calculation; an entered zero remains an explicit assumption.

Separate time from billing.

Working hours and billable hours differ. Your utilization assumption accounts for the share of available time you expect to invoice.

Use revenue margin correctly.

Required revenue equals annual costs divided by one minus margin. Divide by billable hours to find the hourly floor.

For staffing firms and consultancies

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