Why break-even beats "how much can I make"
Ask most freelancers what they need to earn each month and you get a shrug. That's how slow months become personal-finance emergencies. Break-even is the reverse-engineered floor: your living costs plus business costs, grossed up for taxes, equals the revenue where you're exactly flat. Everything above it is savings; everything below it is burn.
The formula: break-even revenue = (living + business costs) ÷ (1 − tax rate). Then dividing by your hourly rate tells you the billable hours — and dividing by ~22 working days gives you the daily target. "I need $4,643/month, which is 78 billable hours, which is ~3.5 hours a day" is a plan; "$60/hour sounds good" is a hope.
What people leave out
Health insurance and retirement contributions (if you freelance, you fund them — they belong in living costs), irregular expenses amortized monthly (that $1,200 laptop is $25–50/month over its life), and the months with no income that you should be buffering with a 3–6 month emergency fund.
Using it for pricing decisions
If break-even needs more billable hours than exist in your month, the answer isn't "work more" — it's raise your rate or cut costs. Compare against the hourly rate calculator: if your actual rate is below what break-even requires, you're financing your clients.
How this calculator derives your revenue target and billable hours
This calculator takes four inputs — monthly living costs, monthly business costs, a combined tax rate, and your hourly rate — and turns them into three outputs: the monthly revenue that leaves you exactly flat, the billable hours that revenue requires, and the weekly and daily pace behind those hours. It adds living and business costs into one monthly floor, then grosses that floor up for taxes, because a freelancer pays tax out of revenue rather than out of a salary that already had it withheld.
Formula: break-even revenue = (monthly living costs + monthly business costs) ÷ (1 − tax rate); required billable hours = break-even revenue ÷ hourly rate; weekly pace = monthly hours ÷ 4.33; daily pace = monthly hours ÷ 22. The result line shows the revenue figure first, then the hours translation — monthly, weekly, and per-day — at the rate you entered. Raise the rate and the revenue target stays fixed while the hours fall; raise the tax assumption and the revenue target rises while the hours follow it.
Worked example: a $3,720 floor at a 27% set-aside
Take an illustrator with $3,400 a month in living costs and $320 in business costs — software, insurance, and a coworking desk two days a week — who sets aside 27% for taxes and bills at $90 an hour. The calculator adds the floor first: $3,400 + $320 = $3,720. It grosses that up for tax: $3,720 ÷ (1 − 0.27) = $3,720 ÷ 0.73 = $5,095.89 a month of revenue to break even. At $90 an hour that is $5,095.89 ÷ $90 = 56.6 billable hours a month, or about 13.1 hours a week across a 4.33-week month and roughly 2.6 hours per working day across 22 days. The reading is immediate: a calendar holding 15 billable hours a week clears the floor with room to save, while a calendar holding only 10 does not — and the fix is a higher rate or lower costs, since the month has no more hours to give.
Limitations: fixed versus variable costs, and taxes on top
This calculator treats your monthly floor as fixed — the same whether you bill ten hours or sixty — which fits rent, subscriptions, and insurance but not costs that scale with the work itself. Platform commissions, payment processing, subcontractors, materials, and per-project licences rise with every job sold, so heavy-marketplace freelancers should treat the result as a minimum and add their average variable cut on top. Taxes are modelled as one flat combined rate, not as brackets, quarterly timing, or self-employment tax specifically — use the tax set-aside calculator for the per-payment figure. Irregular costs (a laptop, a conference, a legal review), unpaid time off, late-paying clients, and months with no sales all sit outside the formula, which is why the number should be recalculated monthly rather than laminated.
Sources: calculator arithmetic as shown above; break-even as part of financial projections per the SBA business-plan guide; scenario walk-throughs in our break-even scenarios guide.
Every figure above is hand-checked: the worked example was recomputed independently of the calculator code, and tax figures track 2026 IRS limits. How we check every page.
Related calculators
Take the floor into the rest of the plan: the runway calculator shows how many months of shortfall your savings cover, the hourly rate calculator rebuilds the rate the floor requires, and the freelance invoice generator keeps score of whether the invoices actually reach it. Scenario walk-throughs are in the break-even scenarios guide.