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A producer emails on a Friday and asks for your day rate. You’ve only ever quoted by the hour. Or a studio offers a weekly number and you need to know what that is per day before you answer, because their days are ten hours and yours are eight. Or it’s January and you’re trying to work out what a day has to cost this year so that the take-home lands where you need it. Three different questions, three tabs below, and none of them send anything anywhere. The result goes into the page address as you type, so you can copy the link and paste it into the thread where the question came from.
Assumptions: half day = 60% of a day; overhead and tax are your figures; unpaid time is already outside billable days. Convert a rate uses the app's rule instead, where a half day is 50% of a day.
A half day here is 50% of a day. A week is 5 days. A shift of half the day length or less on a day rate bills as a half day.
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What each tab answers
Plan a rate is the January question. You give it the take-home you need, your overhead for the year (software, insurance, the drive you’ll buy anyway), the share of gross that goes to tax, the number of days you can bill, and how long a billable day is. It works backwards from there. The take-home plus overhead is what has to be left after tax, so gross is that sum divided by what tax leaves you. Gross divided by billable days is the day. The day divided by hours is the hour. A half day is 60 percent of a day, which is a pricing convention and not a measurement: a half day costs you most of a day’s availability, so it shouldn’t cost the client half. A week is five days.
Worked example, the one the tool is tested against: $85,000 take-home, $6,000 overhead, 30 percent tax, 120 billable days, eight-hour days. Gross comes out at $130,000. The day is $1,083.33, the half day $650, the hour $135.42, the week $5,416.65. If 120 days sounds low, that’s the point of the input. A freelancer who bills five days a week for fifty weeks is rare; most of us lose days to pitching, admin, gaps between jobs, and the week in August nobody calls. Count the days you billed last year and put that number in. Unpaid time is already out of the day count, so the tool doesn’t subtract it again anywhere else.
Convert a rate is the Friday question. Give it an amount in any unit, pick the unit you want, and set the terms that make the conversion honest: how long a day is (8, 10 or 12 hours), what a half day is worth, how many days make a week, and whether overtime kicks in after a threshold and at what multiplier. A $1,000 week on ten-hour days is $200 a day and $20 an hour; the same week on eight-hour days is $25 an hour, and that gap is the whole reason to ask the producer how long their day is before you say yes. The half day here is 50 percent of a day, because this tab is about what gets billed on an invoice rather than what you’d quote, and billing convention splits the day evenly. Both conventions are stated on the page so nobody is surprised by the difference.
Billable hours is the end-of-month question. Add lines of hours times rate, with decimals if your notes say 1.75, set the increment you round to (15 minutes is common, 6 minutes if you bill like a lawyer), and it totals them. Rounding happens once per rate, not once per line, so three short calls at the same rate don’t each get rounded up to a quarter hour. If you bill two rates on one job, the tool keeps them in separate groups and sums the groups.
Why the rounding matters
Rate math is money math, and money math should be done in whole cents with one rounding step, not in floating point with a rounding at the end. The convert and billable tabs run on integer cents: multipliers are stored in hundredths, each conversion is one division rounded once, and hourly slices are rounded up to your increment before they’re priced. That’s how an invoice stays reconcilable with a timesheet. It is also the same arithmetic the time-tracking app I’m building uses for its own earnings, checked against the same test cases, so a day you track there and a day you convert here come out to the cent. The plan tab is different on purpose: it’s a planning tool with the site’s own assumptions (the 60 percent half day, the five-day week), and those are stated rather than hidden.
Two things the tool won’t do. It won’t tell you what the market pays; that’s a survey question, and the video editor and post-production rates page has the two community surveys I trust, with the year and the sample size next to every figure. And it won’t argue a day length for you. What an 8, 10 or 12-hour day means, what a half day is, and how overtime and kit fees fit around a day rate is in day rates in creative work.
How to use the three together
Start in Plan with last year’s real numbers and get a day rate you can defend. Take that day into Convert and see what it is per hour on the client’s day length, and per week on their week. Quote in the unit they asked for, with the day length written into the quote. Then, at the end of the month, put the hours or days you tracked into Billable hours and check that the invoice matches the quote. If it doesn’t, one of your assumptions was wrong, and the tool makes it easy to see which one. The longer version of the method, including when a flat project price beats a day rate, is in how much should I charge.
The rest of the reference shelf
This sits next to the video storage calculator and the aspect ratio calculator: small tools that answer one question and hand you a link. If a tab gives you a result that looks wrong, tell me what you typed and what you expected, and I’ll fix the tool rather than the page.
