Ask a new freelancer how many billable hours a week they plan on and most say 40, sometimes 35 to be safe. Ask freelancers who have tracked every hour for a year and the answer clusters between 20 and 28. The gap is where rates get set wrong, cash gets tight in month three, and people conclude they are bad at this. They are not. They just planned around a number that does not exist.
Where the other hours go
A 40-hour week for a freelancer contains a lot of work that nobody pays for directly. Proposals and discovery calls for projects that may never start. Invoicing, chasing invoices, bookkeeping. Updating a portfolio, answering a lead on LinkedIn, learning a tool a client now expects you to use. Taxes. The 15 minutes between calls that is not long enough to open the real work.
None of that is wasted. Some of it is the most important work you do. But if you only log client hours you will never see how much of it there is, and you will keep wondering why a "full" week paid for 24 hours. The fix is to log everything, billable or not, and let the billable flag do the sorting. After a month you will have your own ratio, and it will not be 100 percent.
What the ratio typically looks like
Freelancers who track non-billable time usually land somewhere in this range:
- Established, with a few steady clients: 60 to 70 percent billable, so 24 to 28 hours of a 40-hour week.
- Growing, still winning new work: 50 to 60 percent, as sales and admin eat the difference.
- First year: often under 50 percent, because everything takes longer and there is more to set up.
These are not targets to hit. They are what to expect so that your rate is built on real hours. If you need $6,000 a month and you can bill 100 hours, your rate is $60, not the $37.50 you get from dividing by 160. Our guide to setting a freelance hourly rate walks through the full calculation.
Finding your own number in two weeks
You do not need a year of data to get a useful figure. Run two normal weeks with one rule: every working block gets logged, and gets the billable switch set honestly. Use a timer for client work if that helps, and type in the admin blocks at the end of the day if you forget to time them. "Invoicing and email, 45 minutes" is accurate enough.
Then open the reports page and look at hours by billable status for those two weeks. The split is your ratio. The second thing to look at is the hours-by-day chart: most people find that one or two days a week are nearly all admin, usually Monday morning and Friday afternoon. That is useful, because you can lean into it. Batch the invoices and the sales calls into the admin day on purpose, and protect the other days for the work that pays.
Raising the ratio without working more
Once you can see the non-billable hours, three of them tend to shrink on their own. Invoicing drops to minutes when the invoice is built from tracked hours instead of memory. Chasing payments shrinks when invoices go out on time and the amounts are clear. And scoping gets faster when you can pull up the last similar project and see exactly how long it took, which also makes your quotes more accurate.
The hours that remain are the real cost of being in business for yourself. Price them in, plan around them, and the 24-hour week stops feeling like a failure and starts looking like what it is: a full week, correctly counted.
A worked example
Say you want to take home $6,000 a month before tax and you work a 40-hour week, so about 170 hours a month. Planned at 100 percent billable, the rate comes out at $35. Tracked honestly at 60 percent, you have 102 billable hours, and the same $6,000 needs a rate of $59. That is the whole gap in one line: the freelancer who set $35 is working the same hours as the one who set $59 and earning $3,570 for it.
The same arithmetic runs the other way when you quote a project. A job you estimate at 20 hours of work will occupy closer to 30 hours of your month once the calls, the revisions, and the invoice are counted. If you can only bill the 20, the other 10 have to be inside the rate. If the client will not pay the rate, the honest answer is that the project costs more than it pays, and your log is what lets you say so with a number instead of a feeling.
Want your own ratio instead of an estimate? Try Gigtime free for 30 days, log two honest weeks, and read the billable split off the reports page.