Unpaid Time Off Cost Calculator

How to use this calculator

Decide how many weeks a year you actually want to not work. Be generous and realistic: two or three weeks of holiday, plus public holidays, plus the days you'll be ill, plus the strange dead week between Christmas and New Year when nobody replies to anything. Four to six weeks is a normal answer, and it's roughly what a salaried job gives people without anyone thinking twice.

Then enter your current hourly rate and the number of billable hours in a working week — hours a client pays for, not hours at your desk. If you work on project fees rather than hourly, divide a typical project fee by the hours it takes and use that.

What the output means

The headline is the rate that makes your desired time off self-funding. The logic is simple: taking weeks off doesn't reduce what you need to earn in a year, it reduces the hours available to earn it. The income you'd have made in those weeks has to be recovered across the weeks you do work, so every remaining hour carries a little more of the load.

The uplift line is the practical takeaway — the dollars per hour you need to add. Notice that it's not proportional in the way people expect: taking 4 of 52 weeks off is roughly an 8% uplift, not 4%, because you're spreading a fixed shortfall over a smaller base. The more time you take, the sharper the curve gets.

Once you know the uplift, the money has to go somewhere real. The mechanism that works is the same one that works for tax: a separate account, funded on a schedule, that you don't touch. Divide the annual income you're giving up by the number of working weeks and transfer that amount weekly, or take a fixed percentage of every invoice. When the holiday arrives, you're not "losing" income — you're spending money the year already earned.

Building it into what you charge

You do not have to announce this to clients, and you shouldn't. The uplift is part of your rate, exactly as a salaried employee's paid leave is part of their employer's cost of employing them. If a client compares your hourly rate to a salaried equivalent, the honest answer is that an employee's headline salary quietly includes paid holiday, sick leave, employer contributions and equipment — and yours has to include them explicitly because nobody else is paying for them.

If the resulting rate feels unsellable at your current positioning, you have three levers: take less time off, bill more hours in the weeks you work, or move upmarket so the rate is defensible. What isn't a lever is pretending the time off is free. Freelancers who never price their holiday don't end up richer; they end up not taking holidays, and then burning out and losing far more weeks than they ever planned to take.