Work backwards, not forwards
Don't start from what others charge. Start from what you need.
Take your target annual income. Add 25–30% for tax and the costs an employer used to absorb. Divide by your realistic billable hours — not 2,000. A full-time freelancer bills roughly 1,000 hours a year once you subtract pitching, admin, revisions, sick days and the weeks nobody replies. Part-time, halve it.
Target $50,000 → $64,000 with tax and overheads → divided by 1,000 → $64/hour as your floor.
That number is a floor, not a price list. It's the point below which work isn't worth doing. Now check it against reality: what the market pays has benchmarks by skill and experience level. If your floor is far above the market for your skill, the fix is the buyer you're targeting, not the arithmetic.
Then stop selling hours
Hourly billing has a design flaw: it pays you less as you get better. The client also has no idea what the total will be, which slows every decision down.
Price the project instead. Estimate the hours, multiply by your floor, add 20% for the revisions that always appear, and quote one number for one defined deliverable with a stated revision count. Keep the hourly rate private — it's your internal check, not the client's business.
Once you're a year or two in, some work moves to value-based pricing, where the fee reflects what the outcome is worth rather than how long it takes. That's a real skill and it doesn't work until you can point to results, so leave it for later. The path there is in how to increase your freelance income.
Starting with no history
Set the floor slightly below your target market rate for the first three or four projects, and tell nobody it's an introductory price. What you're buying is testimonials and case studies, not experience. Then raise it. Two completed projects with a written testimonial is enough to move to market rate.
Never advertise a discount. A rate that was low once is very hard to explain later, and the portfolio you build at cheap rates will quietly cap what you can charge next.
Saying the number
State the price and stop talking. The pause after a quote is normal, and filling it with a discount is the most expensive habit in freelancing. If the answer is that the budget is smaller, reduce scope rather than price — fewer pages, fewer revisions, longer timeline. Your rate stays intact and they still get something.
Put the number in the proposal itself, not "let's discuss on a call" — see the proposal template.
Raising rates
Every new client gets the new rate; existing clients get 30 days' notice and a short, unapologetic message. Expect to lose one, usually the one you like least. Who you sell to matters more than any of this — why the buyer sets your rate covers why the same work earns four times more in a different market.