Step 1: Calculate your costs
There are many elements to take into account: your professional costs (housing), taxes, social security, insurance and expenses, such as:
- Travel, car or mobility costs
- Phone and internet
- Equipment (laptop, camera, ...)
- Legal and administrative fees
- Software subscriptions
- Food and drinks
- Training
- Marketing
You should also keep private expenses such as food, health and fitness, gifts, travel, hobbies in mind.
Step 2: determine your minimum billable amount
- Step 2a: Calculate your billable hours. Generally, 3-4 days a week. The rest of the time you will do work that you can’t charge your client for: admin, marketing, education, …
- Step 2b: Divide your costs with your billable hours. This is the absolute minimum you need to charge to survive
Step 3: determine your profit
Add what you would like to have as a profit on top of covering costs.
Stap 4: determine your final rate
Divide your costs + desired profit with your billable hours. This sum is your rate.
In general, you should not charge less than 45 € per hour to operate full time as a freelancer in Belgium sustainably. You might be surprised that the amount is so high. This is due to the fact that you as a freelancer pay costs and take risks the employer usually covers. E.g., if you get ill, your employer doesn’t need to pay for it.
Instead of a price per hour, it’s also possible to charge per project, or by results or by a retainer. Or a combination of all these.
The type of assignment (business impact, risk), the turnover of clients (do you serve many clients or only a few), the amount of competition (the more competition the lower the price usually), the company size (the bigger the client the bigger the budget tends to be), the sector in which you will be working, and the region also play a role in the rate. Sometimes job agencies publish barometers with average prices.
Be sure to browse the platforms, check it out in your network, or through the Freelancers in Belgium community.
