Home Profit Calculator

Job Profit Calculator

See exactly how profitable each project or client is after all costs, expenses, and your time are accounted for.

Project Details

Project Name (optional)

Currency

Invoice / Project Price

Hours Worked

Project Costs

Cost Description

Amount

Total Costs $0.00

Calculating...

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Export

Net Profit

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After all costs

Effective Hourly Rate

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per hour worked

Profit Margin

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of project revenue

Earnings Breakdown

Full Project Analysis

Rate Benchmarks

How does your effective hourly rate compare to common freelance benchmarks?

Why Tracking Project Profitability Matters

Many small business owners track their invoices but never analyse whether individual projects were actually profitable. A project that bills $5,000 might look great on the surface — but if you spent 80 hours on it and had $800 in software and subcontractor costs, your effective hourly rate was just $52.50. Understanding your real earnings per hour is critical to making smarter decisions about which clients to take, which projects to price higher, and which types of work to avoid.

The Job Profit Calculator helps you see past the headline figure and understand the economics of each project. By inputting your total project fees, all associated costs, and hours worked, you get an instant picture of your true profit, profit margin percentage, and the hourly rate you actually earned — not the one you quoted.

What to Include in Project Costs

Direct project costs include any expenses you incurred specifically for this project: subcontractor fees, stock photos or assets, domain names, hosting, specific software licenses, travel, printing, and any other out-of-pocket expenses. You can optionally include a proportion of your fixed overheads if you want to calculate a fully-loaded profit figure — for example, allocating a monthly software subscription cost across your projects for the month.

Interpreting Your Profit Margin

For freelance service businesses, healthy profit margins vary by industry. Design and writing projects typically see 40–70% margins. Development projects often run 30–60%. Projects with significant subcontracting or material costs naturally have lower margins. The key benchmark is your effective hourly rate — if it's consistently below your target hourly rate from the Rate Calculator, you need to either charge more, reduce costs, or work more efficiently.

This calculator shows you the profit before accounting for the value of your own time — that's what the effective hourly rate metric captures. If you enter an "opportunity cost" for your own time as a cost item, the profit figure will reflect what's left after paying yourself at that rate.

For pure service freelance work (no significant material costs), aim for a profit margin of 60% or higher before paying yourself. For projects with significant subcontracting, 30–50% is reasonable. Below 20% margin, you may be undercharging for the risk and coordination overhead involved.

First, check if the project took longer than scoped (scope creep). If so, implement tighter contracts and change-order processes. If costs were the issue, consider whether those costs were avoidable. If it was both, the project was likely underpriced from the start — use the Pricing & Rate Calculator to reassess your baseline.