The rate tab
Take-home income, tax rate, business costs, weeks off, hours per week, billable share, a cushion for gaps. Out comes gross income, billable hours, the hourly floor and the day rate.
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LoginFree download · XLSX
Turn the income you need into an hourly rate, a per-word rate, and a quote you can send
Fill seven yellow cells and get your minimum hourly rate: the number below which a job costs you money. Then per-word rates for eight kinds of writing, editing time by depth, and a quote builder with rush fee, deposit and balance.
XLSXLive formulas4 tabs
- 7
- inputs to your minimum hourly rate
- 6
- edit depths with minutes per 1,000 words
- 54
- formulas, recalculated in Excel with zero errors
What is inside
Built for the work, not the feed.
Freelance writers, editors and small agencies who keep guessing their rates and under-quoting edits.
Per-word rates by kind of writing
Blog with light research, heavy research, landing pages, email sequences, case studies, technical docs, ghostwriting, editing: typical words per hour and what that means per word and per 1,000 at your rate.
Editing time by depth
Proofread, copyedit, line edit, substantive, rewrite, fact-check: low and high minutes per 1,000 words, a difficulty multiplier, and a low, typical and high price for the job.
The quote builder
Line items with words, depth and hours; rate pulled from your floor; subtotal, rush fee, deposit, balance on delivery, total hours and the effective per-word rate.
Benchmarks you overwrite
The words-per-hour and minutes figures are typical ranges, labelled as such. Time five jobs and replace them with your own numbers.
Look inside
These are the actual pages you get.
Screenshots are taken from the file itself, not a mock-up. What you see here is what lands in your inbox.
How to use it
Three steps, then it is yours.
- 1Fill the seven yellow cells on the Rate tab. Your minimum hourly rate calculates.
- 2Enter a word count and pick a depth on the Editing time tab to price an edit.
- 3Build the quote line by line and copy it into your proposal.
Questions
Before you download
01Where do the benchmarks come from?
They are typical ranges from common editorial practice, not a survey, and the sheet says so. Your own log beats them: track five jobs and overwrite the yellow benchmark cells.
02Does it work in a currency other than dollars?
Yes. The dollar sign is only a display format. The arithmetic is the same in any currency.
03Do I need Excel?
Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice. The formulas avoid anything that only one of them supports.
Get the file
From the income you need to the price you quote
Enter your name and email and it arrives in a minute. One email per new resource after that, and you can leave any time.
Prefer to skip the download? Start Orwellix free and do the editing inside the document instead.
