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HOW TO DETERMINE YOUR HOURLY RATE.
Step one: Decide how many hours you want to work each week. Make it as many or as few as you think you can maintain on an average basis. You set the upper and lower limits. Your working hours are not to include your family, personal, social or spiritual activities. "Working" time only, please.
Working hours per week = ______?

Step two: Multiply your weekly work hours by 4.333 to determine work hours per month.
52 weeks in a year divided by 12 months per year equals 4.3333333333 (a repeating decimal) weeks per month.
Working hours per month = ______?

Step three: Determine your monthly living expenses. Be complete and thorough. Include everything like rent, gas, auto/health/life insurance, food, clothing. Everything.
Monthly living expenses = $______.00?

Step four: Determine your monthly business expenses. Be complete and thorough. Include everything like office rental, telephone, printing, networking. Everything.
Monthly business expenses = $______.00?

Step five: Add the totals from steps three and four to determine your breakeven point. Breakeven is the amount of money you must generate every month just to maintain your present standard of living.
Monthly total expenses = $______.00?

Step six (when you have no employees/contractors): Divide your preferred total working hours from step two by the number three. (Studies have shown that the sole practitioner spends about one third of the available time in non-billable administrative/executive business related activities and about one third of the available time in non-billable marketing activities and about one third of the available time in producing billable work.
Remaining available hours per month to produce revenue = ______?

Step six (when you have employees/contractors): Divide your preferred total working hours from step two by the number four. (Studies have shown that the practitioner with employees/contractors spends about one fourth of the available time in non-billable administrative/executive business related activities and about one fourth of the available time in non-billable marketing activities and about one fourth of the available time in managing/supervising employees/contractors and about one fourth of the available time producing billable work.
Remaining available hours per month to produce revenue = ______?

Step seven: Divide your total expenses from step five by remaining available hours in step six. This produces your breakeven point hourly billing rate.
Breakeven point hourly billing rate $______.00?

Step eight: Determine the multiplier for your breakeven point hourly billing rate. This multiplier is in consideration of several factors, including any particular client using you solely because of low price while another has selected you for quality or dependability or convenience or the uniqueness of your services. It is reasonable to expect that you may have a different multiplier for different clients, circumstances and/or bidding situations. Remember, however, that your multiplier is of your breakeven point hourly billing rate.
Multiplier A _____ yields an hourly billing rate of $______.00?
Multiplier B _____ yields an hourly billing rate of $______.00?
Multiplier C _____ yields an hourly billing rate of $______.00?

Examples: Say you decide you can work 35 hours per week.
Step one = 35 hours per week.
Step two = 151.655 hours per month (35 x 4.333)
Step three = $3,250.00 as monthly living expenses
Step four = $1,200.00 as monthly business expenses
Step five = $4,450.00 as total monthly expenses
Step six = 50.551 available billing hours having no employees/contractors
Step seven = $88.029 breakeven hourly billing rate
Step eight (with multiplier A of 1.05 because client is buying on price) = $92.43 per hour
$92.43 per hour times 50.551 hours per month = $4,672.42 minus $4,450.00 = $222.42 surplus
Step eight (with multiplier B of 1.35 because client is buying on dependability) = $118.83 per hour
$118.83 per hour times 50.551 hours per month = $6,006.97 minus $4,450.00 = $1,556.97 surplus
Step eight (with multiplier C of 3.50 because client is buying on uniqueness) = $308.10 per hour
$308.10 per hour times 50.551 hours per month = $15,574.76 minus $4,450.00 = $11,124.76 surplus

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