A freelancer on r/freelance posted this after tracking their time for the first time:
"I've been telling myself I charge $75/hour. I tracked everything for one week — including emails, revisions, project management, invoicing, and the random 'quick questions' from clients. My actual rate? $31/hour. I feel sick."
This isn't an outlier. It's the norm. The gap between what freelancers think they earn per hour and what they actually earn is one of the most consistent findings across freelance communities online. And the gap is almost always in the wrong direction.
The Invisible Hours
Every freelance project has two categories of time:
Visible hours: The work itself. Designing, coding, writing, building. This is what you estimate, what you quote, and what you think about when you set your rate.
Invisible hours: Everything else. And "everything else" is where your rate goes to die.
What Freelancers Forget to Track
Based on hundreds of Reddit threads about time tracking revelations, here are the invisible hours that consistently shock freelancers:
Client communication: Emails, Slack messages, "quick calls" that run 45 minutes, responding to questions, explaining decisions, chasing feedback. Freelancers on r/webdev report spending 15–25% of their project time on communication alone.
Project management: Organizing tasks, updating timelines, tracking deliverables, managing files, sending status updates. A project manager on r/freelance estimated that self-managed freelancers spend 10–15% of their time on admin that companies hire full-time PMs to handle.
Revisions and feedback loops: The quoted project included "2 rounds of revisions." The actual project involved 6 rounds, including 3 that were technically feedback on feedback. Each round takes time to review, understand, implement, and present.
Context switching: Moving between projects, re-reading where you left off, loading the project back into your brain. One developer tracked their context switches and found they lost 45 minutes per day just "getting back into it" after switching between clients.
Scope creep absorption: The "can you also" requests that you did for free because they seemed small. Individually, 15 minutes each. Collectively, 3+ hours per project.
Invoicing and admin: Creating invoices, following up on late payments, bookkeeping, tax prep, updating your portfolio, responding to new inquiries.
The One-Week Experiment
Here's the challenge: track every minute you spend on work for one full week. Not just billable work — everything.
The Rules
- Track all project time — design, development, writing, whatever your deliverable is
- Track all communication — emails, messages, calls, even the 2-minute Slack replies
- Track all admin — invoicing, proposals, project setup, file management
- Track all revision time — separate from initial creative work
- Track all gaps — the time between tasks where you're technically "working" but context-switching or unfocused
What You'll Discover
The freelancers who've posted their results on Reddit consistently report:
- Billable-to-total ratio: 50–65%. Meaning for every hour you bill, you're working 1.5–2 hours total.
- Communication overhead: 3–5 hours per week per active client
- Admin time: 5–8 hours per week (more for solo freelancers without assistants)
- Effective rate: 30–50% lower than stated rate
One web developer tracked religiously for a month and shared this breakdown:
| Category | Hours/Week | % of Total | |---|---|---| | Billable work | 22 | 55% | | Client communication | 6 | 15% | | Revisions | 4 | 10% | | Admin/invoicing | 3 | 7.5% | | Proposals/sales | 3 | 7.5% | | Context switching | 2 | 5% | | Total | 40 | 100% |
They were billing for 22 hours but working 40. At their $100/hour rate, their actual rate was $55/hour.
How This Changes Your Quoting
Once you see your real numbers, three things become obvious:
1. Your Estimates Are Too Low
If you estimate based on "how long will the actual work take?" you're ignoring 35–50% of the real time. A 20-hour project is really a 30–35 hour commitment. Your quote should reflect that.
Use our Project Cost Estimator to build quotes that include overhead and buffer. The tool adds a configurable overhead percentage specifically to account for the invisible hours.
2. Your Rate Is Too Low
Your hourly rate needs to cover all your working hours, not just billable ones. If you're billing 55% of your time, your hourly rate needs to be roughly 80% higher than your "I need to earn $X" number.
Use our Freelance Rate Calculator to calculate a rate that accounts for your actual billable percentage. The difference between your current rate and the calculated rate is what you're leaving on the table.
3. You Need Scope Protection
A huge portion of the invisible hours come from unmanaged scope: extra revisions, communication overhead from vague briefs, and scope creep you absorbed for free. A proper scope agreement with defined revision limits, communication protocols, and change request processes eliminates the most expensive invisible hours.
The Math That Changes Everything
Before tracking:
- Quoted rate: $80/hour
- Estimated project hours: 20
- Project quote: $1,600
After tracking:
- Actual total hours (including invisible time): 32
- Effective rate: $50/hour
- Annual difference (across 20 projects): $19,200
Use our Scope Creep Calculator to see how much scope creep specifically is costing you. Then use the Profit Margin Calculator to see your real margins after accounting for all overhead.
What to Do With the Data
After your tracking week:
- Calculate your real billable ratio. Divide billable hours by total hours. This is your efficiency rate.
- Adjust your hourly rate. Divide your target annual income by your actual billable hours per year — not your total working hours.
- Add overhead to every quote. The Project Cost Estimator has an overhead field for exactly this purpose.
- Identify your biggest time drains. Is it communication? Revisions? Admin? Each one has a different fix.
- Build scope agreements that protect the invisible hours. Define communication channels, revision limits, and change processes in every scope of work.
One week of honest tracking. That's all it takes to see the gap between what you charge and what you earn. Once you see it, you'll never quote the same way again.