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One of the biggest problems many writers have when setting their freelance writing rates is understanding exactly how many working hours they should base their rates on. Whether a writer ultimately decides to set their freelance writing fees on a per-hour, per-word, or per-project basis, those rates are in some way based off of what the freelance writer has to earn hourly on average to meet their writing income goals.

In order to find the best hourly rate for yourself as a freelance writer, you’ll need to understand the difference between working hours and billable hours.

Working hours include every hour you work (assuming a “typical” full-time work week, we’ll say that’s forty hours).

Billable hours, on the other hand, are the number of working hours that you can actually bill out to clients, minus the hours spent marketing and on administrative duties.

Billable hours are often approximately, or a little more than, half of your total working hours if you’re not neglecting anything on the administrative and marketing side of your freelance writing career. To simplify the numbers, let’s round it to exactly half, and say that out of a forty hour work week, you would have twenty billable hours.

What that means is that the average hourly freelance writing rate you would have to charge for clients will be based on twenty hours per week instead of forty hours per week. Let’s look at an example (factoring that you would work eight hours per day, five days per week for around forty-five weeks of the year after accounting for holidays, vacation, and other time off):

If your freelance writing income goal were to earn $50,000 per year, many writers would assume that they would divide their income goal by the number of weeks, and then divide again by the hours worked per week, which would give them an hourly rate of:

$50,000 / 45 weeks / 40 hours per week = $27.78 per hour

The problem with this assumption is that, out of a forty hour work week, it’s not realistic to think that you would bill out all forty hours. As mentioned before, about half of your total working hours should be spent on marketing and administrative duties (especially in the beginning before you have a regular client base).

To get a more realistic average hourly rate to earn this income goal, you would instead base the calculation on billable hours each week, and you would get:

$50,000 / 45 weeks / 20 hours per week = $55.56 per hour

After figuring out a realistic set of freelance writing rates at the hourly level based on billable hours, a freelance writer can estimate the amount of time it takes to complete a certain type of project or to write a certain number of words, which is an effective way to then set per-project or per-word freelance writing fees.

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Jennifer Mattern is a full-time freelance business writer and Web content writer. She runs the All Freelance Writing blog, and is the author of several e-books including the Web Writer’s Guide on launching a successful freelance Web writing career.

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