This is a floor, not a price.
The rate is what the year has to bring in, divided by the hours you can actually
send an invoice for. Charge less than it and you are earning less than the salary
you typed, whatever the day rate looks like. What the market will pay is a
different question, and usually a higher number than this one.
It is stated before GST. If you are
registered, the 10% goes on top of this figure on the invoice and is not yours to
keep, so it does not belong in the sum. The
GST calculator
adds it.
Nobody is paying your super any more.
An employee on the salary you typed was also getting the superannuation guarantee
paid on top of it —
12%
since 1 July 2025. On $90,000
that is $10,800
a year that never showed up in a payslip. A freelancer who leaves it out of the rate
has given themselves a pay cut and not noticed.
Nothing obliges a sole trader to pay their own super. The toggle is on by default
anyway, because the question the page answers is what the job you left was paying,
and that figure was in it. It stops where an employer's obligation stops: the
guarantee is only owed on earnings up to the maximum contribution base,
$270,830
a year from 1 July 2026, so a salary above that gets the same super as one
exactly at it.
Per the ATO's super guarantee rates.
An employee gets about seven weeks off.
Four weeks of annual leave, ten days of personal and carer's leave, and the public
holidays, which run to about two weeks in every state. Close to seven weeks in which
an employee is paid and does not work. The slider starts at four because that is
the number people know; the honest figure for most years is higher, and the rate
moves a fair way between the two.
The label says for any reason on purpose. A
week with no client in it is a week off, whether or not it was planned.
Per the Fair Work Ombudsman on
annual leave
and sick and carer's leave.
A week is 38 hours, and you will not bill all of it.
Thirty-eight is the maximum ordinary hours for a full-time employee under the
National Employment Standards, so it is the week this page assumes. Working sixty
does not lower the rate you need; it lowers the rate you can get away with, which
is not the same thing.
Of those 38, some go to quoting, some to sending and chasing invoices, some to
learning the next thing, and some to having nothing on. None of it goes on an
invoice. A quarter is a gentle guess for someone established; a first year is
often closer to half.
Per the Fair Work Ombudsman on maximum weekly hours.
Expenses are the ones you would not have as an employee.
Software, insurance, the accountant, the laptop on a three-year life, a share of the
phone and the internet, the co-working desk. A monthly figure because that is how
most of it arrives; the page multiplies it by twelve. Income tax is not an expense
here — the salary is before tax, so the tax is already inside it.
This page reports arithmetic.
What rate covers a $90,000 salary
is a question it can answer;
what your business should charge
depends on what you sell and who buys it, and there is no adviser behind Bilby.
The tax side of a rate — GST registration, what counts toward the threshold — is
worked through in the
guides
, with the ruling or the section named beside each claim.