Working Hours vs Billable Hours for Freelance Professionals
It’s not uncommon for individuals interested in freelancing to think about potential rate and fee structures in terms of their familiar forty-hour work week. Many miss the fact that there are two very distinct ways of viewing their time as a freelancer: working hours and billable hours.
Working Hours - The total number of hours you do any kind of work on your freelance career (equivalent to time spent “on the job” as an employee).
Billable Hours - The portion of working hours the freelance professional is actually able to invoice to clients (the only hours that matter when determining your freelance rates). During billable hours, the freelancer would be working on client projects or other projects bringing in a direct income.
It’s also not uncommon for freelancers to spend close to half of their working hours as non-billable hours. So what do they do with all of that time where they’re not directly earning money?
There’s a lot more to freelancing than client projects. Here are some of the other basic tasks freelancers have to invest time into during their working hours:
- Accounting / Bookkeeping
- Correspondence (email, phone calls, letters, etc.)
- Other Administrative Duties (filing, basic maintenance, etc.)
- Networking
- Marketing / Advertising / PR (from updating their website and professional blog to offering sales, pitching services, etc.)
If you’re considering a future freelance career, be realistic about how many hours in a day (or week) you’ll really be able to bill out to clients, and set your rates accordingly. Otherwise you’ll soon find yourself working far too much for far too little, and you’ll suffer the all-to-common burnout many freelancers face at one time or another. Always try to understand exactly what you’re getting yourself into work-wise before you make the leap into freelancing.
Very good post and I have picked up some salient points on freelance job opportunities and how to become more successful at it.
Peter Lee
Home Ideas and Opportunities
I’ve been freelancing now for a couple of months and at the beginning I would have read this and thought, ‘yeah yeah’ … now that I’ve started to get enough work to sustain me I’m starting to really understand what you’re talking about.
When you start out it seems you jsut want to grab as much work as you can and even drop your price as you get busier because there’s less time to look for the job after the one you’re working on.
I’ve found myself now approaching 8 billable hours a day 6 days a week but I’m actually working nearly double that and I know that something has to give.
I’m quite surprised at how quickly you need to adapt to your changing situation while freelancing - concerns one week are just a background concern the next and replaced by a whole new set of issues … anyways - loved the post but I’d better get back to my billable