Daily Rate to Annual Salary — working days, hourly equivalent, and what rate you actually need
Turn a day rate into an annual, monthly and hourly figure using the days you really work, then work backwards from a target income to the daily rate you need and how many days it would take. Everything is calculated in your browser.
Day counts, the hourly figure, the reverse row
The multiplication is easy; the day count is the hard part
Nobody gets rate × days wrong, yet that is where most day-rate estimates fail, because the day count is a guess.
- Employment baseline: about 250 days. 365 minus 104 weekend days minus roughly 11 public holidays. Use this when comparing a contract against a salaried job.
- Freelance reality: lower. Pipeline work is unpaid — pitching, scoping, revising, chasing invoices — and holidays are unpaid too. 240 or even 220 is usually closer to the truth.
- Project or seasonal work: much lower. Count only the days you are actually on site or billed, e.g. 150.
Overestimating this number inflates your projected income systematically, which is exactly how “I earned well on paper” turns into a bad year.
The hourly figure is for you, not for clients
Dividing the day rate by real hours gives your actual hourly price. It is the fastest sanity check on a job offer: a rate that looks generous can be worse than a modest one once you discover you spend eleven hours a day on it, half of them waiting.
How to use the reverse row
The bottom three cards answer the same question in three framings — read them before you quote, not after:
- Rate the target requires = target ÷ working days. Quote below it and the year cannot reach your goal, you just will not notice until December.
- Gap against your current rate — how much the price has to move.
- Days needed at your current rate — if this exceeds about 250, the only path to “more income” is working more days, which is a dead end. Raising the rate usually has more leverage than burning holidays.
Gross is not net
What you see here is pre-tax:
- Employees compare against gross salary too, but remember employer-paid benefits and pension contributions are part of a job offer and are missing from a day rate.
- Self-employed pay their own insurance, retirement, accounting, software and equipment. Add those to the target before back-solving, otherwise the “required rate” is too low.
- Vacancy risk. High day rates often come with short engagements. A 1,200/day contract for six weeks is not automatically better than 700/day for five months; run both numbers before deciding.
Questions
Should I count unpaid admin time as working days? Yes, but at zero revenue. Billable days belong in the first tool you use for pricing; total working days belong here, otherwise you will compare apples to oranges.
Is a monthly salary comparable to a day rate? Convert both to annual using the same day count, then compare. Skipping that step makes contract work look worse than it is, because salaried months are paid whether or not there was work.
What if my rate changes through the year? Run the tool per engagement with that engagement’s day count and add the annual figures. Averaging one blended rate hides most of the risk.