Ask a freelancer how many hours they work in a week and you’ll get one number. Ask how many of those hours a client actually paid for and you’ll usually get a pause, then a smaller number, then a slightly uncomfortable look.
That gap — between the hours you work and the hours you bill — is where most freelance income quietly leaks away. Not through bad clients or low rates, but through the email, admin, sales calls and “quick favours” that fill a week without ever reaching an invoice. Knowing which side of the line each hour falls on is the first step to pricing for it properly.
Billable hours are time spent directly on client work that you charge for: doing the work, client calls, revisions within scope. Non-billable hours are everything that keeps the business running but isn’t charged to a client: admin, invoicing, marketing, learning. Most freelancers bill around 50–70% of their working hours, so set your rate to cover the non-billable time too.
What billable hours are
A billable hour is an hour of work that you charge a specific client for, because it was spent doing their project. If a client could reasonably look at a line on your timesheet and say “yes, that was for us”, it’s billable.
What counts depends partly on your agreement, but the usual list looks like this:
- The work itself — designing, writing, coding, consulting, editing.
- Client communication about the project — calls, meetings, and substantive emails that move the work forward.
- Project research — reading the client’s brief, studying their existing systems, researching their market.
- Revisions within the agreed scope — the rounds of changes you included in the price.
- Project-specific admin — preparing a handover document, setting up the client’s staging environment, writing their reports.
The test is specificity. Time that exists only because this client hired you is a strong candidate for billable. Time you’d spend whether or not they existed is not.
What non-billable hours are
Non-billable hours are the time it takes to run a business rather than do a client’s project. Nobody pays for them directly, but you can’t skip them either:
- Admin — invoicing, bookkeeping, chasing payments, filing receipts, taxes.
- Sales and marketing — writing proposals, pitching, updating your portfolio, posting on LinkedIn, discovery calls with prospects who don’t sign.
- Learning — courses, new tools, keeping your skills current.
- Internal work — your own website, contracts, templates, process improvements.
- Unbillable client time — small favours, overruns on fixed-price work, revisions beyond scope you chose to absorb.
That last category is the dangerous one. The first four are honest overhead you can plan for. The fifth is client work you’ve done for free, often without deciding to. It’s usually where scope creep shows up first — not as a dramatic new request, but as an hour here and an hour there that never quite made it onto the bill.
The grey areas, settled
Some activities sit on the line, and freelancers handle them differently. A sensible default for each:
- Travel to a client’s site. Commonly billable, sometimes at a reduced rate. Say so in your terms before the first trip.
- The first discovery call. Non-billable — it’s sales. Follow-up workshops once they’ve signed are billable.
- Learning a tool the client requires. Billable if it’s specific to their stack and you’d never use it otherwise; non-billable if it’s a skill you’d want anyway.
- Fixing your own mistakes. Non-billable. Clients pay for the work, not for correcting it.
- Quick questions by email. Billable when they add up. Ten five-minute answers a week is close to an hour, and many freelancers bill these in 15-minute blocks.
Whatever you decide, write it down in your contract or quote. A grey area that you’ve defined in advance is just a term; one you haven’t defined is an argument waiting for the invoice.
Your billable utilisation rate
Your billable utilisation rate is the percentage of your working hours that you actually bill. The formula is simple:
Utilisation rate = billable hours ÷ total working hours × 100
If you work 40 hours in a week and bill 26 of them, your utilisation is 65%. That number matters more than almost any other, because it tells you what your hourly rate really earns. Charging 100 an hour at 65% utilisation is the same income as charging 65 an hour for every hour you work.
As a rough guide, many solo freelancers land somewhere between 50% and 70%. Below 50% usually means too much time is going on sales or admin, or that a lot of client work is going unbilled. Consistently above 80% is possible on long retainers, but it often means the business is being neglected — no marketing, no learning, no pipeline for when the current client ends. It’s one of the financial metrics every solo business should track, because it moves before your income does.
How to price for the hours nobody pays for
Non-billable time can’t be invoiced, but it still has to be paid for. The only place that money can come from is your billable rate.
That’s why the classic mistake — taking the salary you want and dividing it by 2,000 working hours a year — undercharges almost everyone. You won’t bill 2,000 hours. At 60% utilisation you’ll bill about 1,200, and the rate needs to cover the full year from those. Set the rate from the hours you’ll actually bill, and the admin, sales and learning are paid for automatically. How to set your freelance rates walks through the full calculation, and the free freelance rate calculator does the arithmetic for you, including the time you’ll spend not billing.
The same logic applies to fixed-price work. When you quote a project, estimate the billable hours and then add the non-billable time the project will drag along with it: the extra calls, the onboarding, the invoice follow-ups. A project that looks profitable at 40 hours of work can look very different once its 12 hours of surrounding admin are counted.
Track both, bill one
You can’t manage a gap you can’t see. The freelancers with healthy utilisation rarely work harder than everyone else — they just track everything, including the time they don’t bill, so they know exactly where the week went.
Two habits do most of the work. First, track time against a project as you go, not from memory at the end of the week; reconstructed timesheets lose the short tasks, and the short tasks are exactly the ones that go unbilled. Tracking time without micromanaging yourself covers how to make that painless. Second, look at the unbilled total before every invoice. Hours that were billable but never got charged are the cheapest income you’ll ever recover — you’ve already done the work.
Tracked time also earns its keep later. When a client questions a bill or pushes back on your next quote, a clean record of where the hours went is far more persuasive than a gut feeling. Using tracked time to defend a quote shows how.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between billable and non-billable hours?
Billable hours are time spent on a client’s work that you charge that client for. Non-billable hours are time spent running your business — admin, sales, marketing, learning — that no client pays for directly. Both are real work; the difference is only who pays, and non-billable time has to be covered by your billable rate.
Are emails and phone calls billable?
Client calls and emails that move a project forward are usually billable, as long as your agreement says so. Many freelancers bill them in 6- or 15-minute increments. Calls with prospects who haven’t signed are sales, so they’re non-billable. State your approach in your contract so clients aren’t surprised to see communication on an invoice.
What is a good billable utilisation rate for a freelancer?
Many solo freelancers bill between 50% and 70% of their working hours. Below that, admin or unbilled client work is probably eating your week. Above 80% for long stretches often means no time is left for marketing or learning, which leaves you exposed when a big client ends. Aim for a steady rate you can sustain.
Should I bill for time spent fixing my own mistakes?
No. Fixing errors that were yours is non-billable, because the client paid for working output, not for corrections. Changes the client requests after approving the work are different: those are new requests, and once you’ve used up the revisions included in your price, they’re billable.
How many billable hours a week can a freelancer realistically work?
For a 40-hour week, somewhere between 20 and 30 billable hours is typical for a solo freelancer. Proposals, invoicing, email and learning take the rest. Plan your rates and your income targets around that realistic number, not around 40 billable hours you’ll rarely reach.
Where Billable comes in
Billable is built around the hours that turn into money. Time tracking runs as a live timer from anywhere in the app, or as hours you log afterwards, and every entry belongs to a project — so each project shows its tracked, unbilled and billed time side by side. When you raise the invoice, the unbilled hours come straight onto it and flip to billed, so nothing is charged twice and nothing is forgotten. The time-tracking guide walks through the setup in a few minutes.
It’s free for your first active project, then one flat plan — no seats, no tiers, no per-user fees. Start tracking and find out where your week actually goes.