BILLABLE HOURS GUIDE
How Many Billable Hours Are in a Year?
A full-time schedule might contain around two thousand working hours in a year, but freelancers normally cannot invoice clients for all of them.
Start with working weeks
A year has 52 weeks. Subtract vacation, holidays and other planned time away from work to estimate your available working weeks.
Then estimate weekly working hours
Multiply working weeks by your normal weekly schedule. This gives total available working hours before separating billable and non-billable work.
Apply a realistic billable percentage
If sixty percent of your time is directly billable to clients, multiply available working hours by 0.60.
Example
48 working weeks × 40 hours = 1,920 available hours. At 60% billable utilization, that becomes approximately 1,152 billable hours per year.
Why this number matters
Your billable-hour estimate affects pricing. If your business needs $90,000 in yearly revenue and you have 1,200 billable hours, those hours need to generate an average of $75 each.