Hourly Rate Calculator Australia

Work backwards, which is what this page does. Decide the money you want in your hand for the year, add the income tax and Medicare levy that sit on top of it at the ATO resident rates, add the super you want to put away and your annual overheads, and you have the revenue you must bill. Divide that by the hours you can genuinely invoice, not the hours you work. On the defaults here, $70,000 in your hand needs $89,000 of pre-tax profit, $10,680 of super and $12,000 of overheads, which is $111,680 of billings across 1,380 billable hours, or $80.93 an hour before GST.

No. Everything above is GST-exclusive, so the rate is what you keep, not what the customer pays. Once your turnover reaches $75,000 in any rolling 12 months you must register, and from then on you add 10% on top and hand that 10% to the ATO on your BAS. Quoting the ex-GST figure as your price to a customer once you are registered costs you a ninth of every invoice, because the GST comes out of the total rather than being added to it. Tick 'Registered for GST' above and the page shows both numbers: the rate you keep, and the price to put on the quote. The default scenario here bills $111,680, well past the threshold, so most people using this tool will be registered.

The tax line is computed, not guessed: the resident scale for the financial year you pick, the Low Income Tax Offset, the 2% Medicare levy and, if you tick it, the study and training loan repayment, all read from the same rate tables our income tax and payroll calculators use. What is not in the figure, and would push your real rate higher: the Medicare levy surcharge if you have no private hospital cover, state payroll tax if you employ, bad debts, unpaid quoting and travel time, and any profit above your own wage. One thing runs the other way and would lower it slightly, the Small Business Income Tax Offset, worth up to $1,000. It is an estimate for pricing, not a tax return.

They are two different denominators and both are useful, which is why the page shows both and labels them. The weekly, fortnightly and monthly columns spread the year evenly over the calendar: annual divided by 52, 26 and 12. That is the figure to plan living costs and PAYG instalments against, because rent does not stop in the weeks you are not working. The revenue per billable week divides by the weeks you actually invoice, 46 of 52 on the defaults, so it is the larger number and it is the one to compare a real week's invoicing against. If the two agreed, you would be assuming you bill in all 52 weeks, including your holidays.

Because those are two different numbers doing two different jobs. A 30% cash holdback is a safety rule for lumpy income and quarterly PAYG instalments, and it is good advice. The effective tax rate is arithmetic: on the resident scale plus the Medicare levy, $89,000 of profit attracts $19,000, which is 21.3%. The effective rate does not actually reach 25% until about $135,000 of profit. This page uses the arithmetic, because the arithmetic is what sets the price. Keep holding back 30% in your bank account if that helps you sleep, the surplus is yours; just do not price the job as though 30% were the tax, or you will quote high and lose work you could have won.

Nobody pays you super, so if you want to match an employee's package you fund it yourself. The Super Guarantee an employer pays is 12% of ordinary earnings, which is the default here, applied to your business profit. Two ceilings are worth knowing. Personal contributions are only deductible up to the concessional contributions cap, $32,500 for FY 2026-27, which 12% crosses at about $270,833 of profit; above that the extra is not deductible and carries an excess contributions charge, and this page shows it as a separate line funded from after-tax money. Separately, an employer's obligation itself stops at the maximum contribution base, $270,830 a year for FY 2026-27.

Fewer than you think, and it is the single biggest lever on your rate, which is why there is a slider on it. Quoting, invoicing, chasing payment, marketing, travel between jobs, bookkeeping and the gaps between work are all real hours and none of them bill. The defaults here, 46 weeks at 30 hours, are 1,380 billable hours against a 1,976-hour full-time year of 38-hour NES weeks, a utilisation of about 70%. Do not take that as a published statistic, take it as a starting point: count the hours you actually invoiced over your last twelve months of invoices and put that in. Drag the slider and watch what happens, the rate moves inversely, so 20 billable hours a week needs $121.39 where 40 needs $60.70.

Because they are not the same thing measured the same way, and most comparisons get this wrong by putting a take-home figure next to a gross wage. Line them up properly. To take home $70,000 an employee needs about $89,000 gross, which over a 1,976-hour year is $45.04 an hour, or $50.45 once their employer's 12% super is counted. The $80.93 this page produces is about 1.6 times that, and the gap is not profit: it is the overheads you now carry, the super nobody pays you, and above all the third of your working year that you cannot invoice to anyone.

This page prices a wage, not a business. What comes out covers your target take-home, your tax, your super and your overheads, and then it stops, so at that price a good year and a break-even year look identical. A business also needs a margin for the things a wage does not survive: an invoice that never gets paid, a quiet quarter, replacing the ute, a tax bill that lands bigger than you planned. The straightforward way to build that in is to raise your target take-home above what you intend to live on and treat the difference as retained profit, or add the amount you want to retain to the overheads field. Either way it should be a deliberate number, not whatever happens to be left.

Not in the rate itself, because you set billable weeks directly and the answer is driven by billable hours per year rather than by counting calendar weeks. It does show up in two places worth knowing. The weekly and fortnightly columns are the year divided by 52 and 26, so in a year that happens to contain 53 of your invoicing day, one extra week of billings arrives on top; that is upside, not a shortfall, and it does not lower the rate you should quote. And if you are the one being paid weekly out of the business, budget on the columns rather than on a count of paydays, for the same reason a payroll year with 53 pays does not make anybody richer per week.