Log your time for each day of the week and get your total billable hours and what to invoice. Type time the way you track it, apply 6- or 15-minute billing increments and copy a ready-made invoice line.
Works with any hourly rate · USD, EUR, GBP, CAD and AUD
Amount = billable hours × hourly rate. Projections assume every week looks like this one.
Choose the week and your rate. Pick the Monday the week starts on, your currency and your hourly rate.
Pick a billing increment. Use exact time, or round each day up to 6 or 15 minutes if that’s what your contract says.
Enter your time for each day. Type it as 7:30, 7.5, 7h 30m or 45m, whichever matches your time tracker.
Check the totals. You’ll see hours and amount per day, the weekly total and what the same pace adds up to per month and per year.
Copy the invoice line and paste it into your invoice.
Billable hours are the hours of work you can charge a client for under your agreement. Everything else you do to run your business is non-billable: necessary, but not paid for directly.
Usually billable: project work, calls and meetings about the project, revisions within scope, research for the client, and travel if your contract covers it.
Usually non-billable: pitching and proposals, invoicing and bookkeeping, internal meetings, learning, and fixing your own mistakes.
Where the line falls depends on your contract, so agree with each client up front what counts, especially calls, travel and extra revisions.
To work out what to invoice, convert your time to decimal hours and multiply by your rate.
Amount to bill = billable hours (as a decimal) × hourly rate
Time trackers often show hours and minutes, but invoices need decimals. Divide the minutes by 60: 7 hours 45 minutes is 7 + 45 ÷ 60 = 7.75 hours. At $75 an hour, that’s $581.25.
Minutes
Decimal hours
5
0.08
6
0.1
10
0.17
15
0.25
20
0.33
30
0.5
40
0.67
45
0.75
50
0.83
Many consultants, lawyers and agencies don’t bill to the minute. Instead, they round each entry up to a fixed increment, most often 6 minutes (a tenth of an hour) or 15 minutes (a quarter of an hour).
Time worked
Exact
6-minute increments
15-minute increments
7 min
0.12 h
0.2 h
0.25 h
22 min
0.37 h
0.4 h
0.5 h
1 h 05 min
1.08 h
1.1 h
1.25 h
4 h 10 min
4.17 h
4.2 h
4.25 h
Rounding should be written into your contract and applied to each task or day, not to the weekly total. If a client hasn’t agreed to increments, bill the exact time.
Here’s the week the calculator starts with: five working days at $75 an hour, rounded up to 6-minute increments.
Day
Time tracked
Billable hours
Amount
Monday
6:30
6.5
$487.50
Tuesday
7:15
7.3
Wednesday
5:45
5.8
$435.00
Thursday
8:00
8.0
$600.00
Friday
4:10
4.2
$315.00
Total
31:40
31.8
$2,385.00
Billed to the exact minute, the same week comes to 31.67 hours and $2,375, so the 6-minute rounding adds $10.
A full-time week is 40 hours. Take away about six weeks for public holidays, vacation and sick days and you have 46 working weeks, or 1,840 hours. Most freelancers bill 60–75% of that, which works out to roughly 1,100 to 1,400 billable hours a year.
That’s why your hourly rate has to cover the hours you can’t bill. See how your week splits with the utilization rate calculator.
Track as you go. Rebuilding a week from memory on Friday almost always loses time.
Add a short note to each entry. “Homepage revisions, round 2” is easier to explain than “design work”.
Log small tasks too. Five 10-minute calls add up to almost an hour.
Keep billable and non-billable time apart, so you can see where the rest of your week goes.
Review your timesheet before you invoice. Fix gaps and overlaps while you still remember the work.
Need a tool? Compare the best time tracking apps for freelancers.
List your hours as line items with the date, a short description, the hours and your rate, so the client can see what they’re paying for. Our guide to itemized invoices shows how to lay it out, and how to make an invoice covers the rest. If a client pays late, our late fee calculator works out what to add. When you’re ready to bill, paste the copied line into our invoice generator and download a PDF.
How do I calculate billable hours?
How do I convert minutes to decimal hours?
What is the 6-minute rule?
Are meetings billable?
Is travel time billable?
How many billable hours a week is normal for a freelancer?
Should I round my hours up?
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From timesheet to invoice
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