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One of the quietest shocks of going freelance is discovering that time off is now an expense. An employee with twenty-five days of paid leave takes holidays, gets sick, and the salary keeps arriving; a freelancer takes the same days and simply does not invoice them — on top of the gaps that were never billed anyway. The honest way to plan is arithmetic: decide your holiday days, add a realistic allowance for sick days, multiply by your daily rate, and you have the real annual cost of resting like a normal human. Divide that by twelve and set it aside monthly, and your time off stops being a hole in your cash flow and becomes a planned expense you have already funded. This calculator does that maths and shows why pricing your year on fifty-two weeks when you only work forty-six is the quiet cause of most freelance burnout.
Employees get paid leave; freelancers pay for their own. See what your planned time off really costs in lost income — and what to set aside each month to cover it.
A reasonable target mirrors a decent employment package: three to four weeks of holiday plus five to ten sick days a year. Fewer than that is not discipline — it is a burnout subsidy paid in lost productivity.
Because a day off costs you a full day of billable income — typically eight billable hours at your rate, not one. Daily-rate maths matches how freelance income actually works.
Early and in writing. Booked holidays are respected; surprise ones cause friction. Telling key clients your dates well ahead also protects the work: they plan around you instead of discovering you are gone.
Every tool answers instantly from our own knowledge and calculators — no AI wait, no account. Want the deeper, personalised version? Each has a $2.95 full report.