Freelance Project Tax Calculator — Calculate taxes and take-home pay for your freelance work

Obviously, anything made in spreadsheets has a lot of room for UI improvement, but those struggles are all meaningless when you recognize the value of this calculator. As a freelancer, it's always unclear how much money you're actually taking home from a project and making sure you're not underpricing yourself. This is something that gets better over time as a freelancer, but in the mean time he/she is leaving money on the table, underpricing themselves, or, worst case scenario, losing money on projects. I'm super impressed by the ease of use and value of information.

Pros:

Super easy to use

Cons:

The UI has room for improvement

When I did freelance back in the day, my #1 complaint was not knowing exactly how much money I was making from each job. Taxes made my life hell. This would have given me some much needed transparency into the billing process. 🎉

Really excited to be launching the calculator on PH today. Over the past 6 months (and multiple years as freelancers ourselves), we've been digging into some of the biggest challenges that freelancers face when running their businesses and the one question that keeps coming to a head is "How do I handle taxes?". We've heard people say things like: - "(Taxes) is absolutely the biggest pain for me personally. At least the most stressful since no matter how much research you do you never know you got it right." - “I am PUMPED for that one (tax withholding) bc I hate taxes. who doesn’t…” The calculator helps provide insights and transparency into what freelancers are actually able to take home on a project by project basis.

Hey everyone! Super excited to be launching this calculator on Product Hunt. I've been helping freelancers for the past few years. One of the biggest things freelancers struggle with when starting out is understanding what they should be setting aside for taxes, and how that affects their pricing and margins. With this calculator, you can: - calculate tax withholding on your project - account for common freelance project costs - adjust the inputs to figure out what you should be charging in order to take home what you want It handles supplemental w2 income, self-employment taxes, federal income taxes, and state/local taxes everywhere in the US. We hope this gives freelancers more peace of mind, and allows them to freelance more profitably! Looking forward to your feedback!

This would have been SUPER useful for me around 5 years ago...I freelanced for a startup when I was in college/right out of school and had zero idea what I was doing in terms of taxes. I'd take on a few extra projects around tax time and use that income to pay off my tax bill. That worked out ok, but having a tool like this would have made my life a lot easier.

The folks at Sail are doing great things for freelancers - pay attention to them!

Pros:

This is a huge value to freelancers, helping with a very stressful problem in a time saving way

Cons:

It's a google sheet - obviously it's not perfect and doesn't have beautiful UI, but it does its job and does it well

A useful tool to see how much a project will net a freelancer after taxes. Can help figure out if you should take on the project and how much taxes to set aside

This tool is super valuable. For being one of the first early stages of this product, you can get a lot out of it.

The breakdown is nice and it's been good to check this out and see a decent implimentation of this kind of calculator.

I'm looking forward to seeing how far this can be explored and developed.

Pros:

The tool really simple

Highly detailed breakdown of taxes

Does calculations for you based on locale

File type allows you to save for later

Cons:

Even though it's early stage, would be nice to have an online tool or app

UI could be improved a bit

Sadly these can only be estimated taxes

As someone who freelances on the side, I didn't really consider the cost of taxes when setting my rates outside of knowing roughly what my marginal tax rate would look like, plus the other taxes on top of it. Looking forward to using this to be conscious of this and help me set better pricing!

this was such a PITA when I was getting my feet wet in freelancing. finances for mere mortals like me :)

When I first started freelancing, I remember doing a job where my after-tax rate was less than minimum wage 🙃 Knowing how to price yourself is really hard. I'm glad to see an easy-to-use calculator starting to solve this huge pain point for freelancers!

Congrats on the launch @mwil20! Looks great.

Looks amazing! As a Canadian, I’m super jealous of this.

Really well made, easy to grasp and does the job it needs to do. @mwil20 have you considered implementing this as a lightweight tool online? Might do well for search rankings and inbound traffic.

Looks very cool. Does this work for taxes in any state? International?

In theory, this calculator is great. But in my opinion, you should be able to tinker around with it a bit before having to give your email address and it would definitely be better as a web app than as a spreadsheet. But all in good time, I'm sure. For now, it gets the job done. :)

Pros:

Gets you clarity on what you should expect to pay in taxes as a freelancer.

Cons:

It's just a spreadsheet. Which presents some obvious UX issues.

I really enjoyed trying out the product and being able to assess how much I should save in taxes. Having already saved in the past, I had a general idea of what % I needed to save and after plugging in my numbers, Freelance Project Tax Calculator gave back almost the same exact number I had been told to save. It's right on the money (no pun intended) and I really enjoy its simplicity.

Pros:

Very user-friendly and take a lot of the work and guessing out of self-employment taxes

Cons:

Perhaps, in time, more functions can be added since there are different layers to self-employment taxes and other variables.

My biggest fear when calculating taxes for freelance work is not about what percentage I should set aside for this project, but what I should set aside for the whole year because I have no idea which tax bracket I'll land in. My income fluctuates greatly year to year. If I end up landing a big project with a big price tag, I could bump myself into the next bracket and be screwed at tax time. It would be nice to see all of this calculated out across all tax brackets so I can get a better picture of what my possible outcomes are.