Your Freelance Day Rate: The 187-Day Formula, a Worked Example and the €1,317 Benchmark

Everyone knows their hourly rate. Almost nobody has done the arithmetic on how many days they can actually sell. Roland König, an IT freelancer and trainer five years into solo work, did it on stage at Freelance Unlocked, and the day count is the whole argument. Here is the formula, a worked example to overwrite with your own numbers, and the 2026 benchmarks.

The formula

Roland's starting point is not the market rate. It is the sum he has to earn.

"You have to start from what you need to earn as a self-employed person to fund your life exactly as you live it. Everything is in there. Tax, pension too, that is a very important point, do not forget those." (Roland König)

Then the time side. A year has 52 weeks. He takes off six weeks of holiday, like a well-treated employee. Then six weeks of continuing education, because he sells himself as a software expert and that knowledge does not come from project work. Then the public holidays.

"I come from the Catholic part of Bavaria, as you can hear from my dialect. That is 13 days in the best case, from an employee's perspective, and I calculate those in and subtract them." (Roland König)

Result: 187 working days. And those days are not eight billable hours. Bookkeeping, marketing, networking and talks like this one eat into every one of them. Roland plans nine hours a day, 6.5 for clients and 2.5 for everything else. 187 days times 6.5 hours is 1,215.5 billable hours. That is his 100%. Ask him for full-time availability and that is what you get.

One correction before you copy the 13. Only nine public holidays apply nationwide. The Länder add their own: Berlin has ten including Frauentag, Bavaria has twelve statewide and a thirteenth, Mariä Himmelfahrt, in predominantly Catholic communities. So your number is between 10 and 13, depending on where you are registered. Roland plans with the maximum on purpose:

"My calculation always refers to the minimum. Those 187 days are, in quotation marks, the minimal year. If I have more days available in a given year, that is in theory extra holiday first." (Roland König)

Fill in your own

Copy this and replace the brackets.

Weeks in the year 52
minus holiday weeks - [6]
minus training weeks - [6]
= working weeks [40]
x 5 = working days [200]
minus public holidays in your Bundesland - [10-13]
= billable days [187]

Billable hours per day [6.5]
= billable hours per year [187 x 6.5 = 1,215.5]

Yearly needs (private + business + tax
+ pension + insurance + project-gap buffer) € [......]

Hourly floor = yearly needs / billable hours € [......]
Day floor = yearly needs / billable days € [......]

Two inputs deserve a second look. The training weeks feel generous until you count the conferences, courses and evenings you actually spend keeping current. And the buffer line came out of Roland's Q&A: weeks without a project are minus hours in his system, and he agreed the reserve belongs on the cost side.

Joachim Groth, who negotiates rates from the intermediary's side as a board member of the IT Projektgenossenschaft, made the same point:

"There are people with six-month or one-year projects, and they have a completely different calculation from people with four- or five-day projects and idle time in between. Those have to calculate the idle time into their floor, and so they automatically have a somewhat higher price. In sectors with short projects that is normal." (Joachim Groth)

A worked example

Take a freelancer in Hamburg, so ten public holidays, six weeks off and four weeks of training rather than Roland's six.

Time side: 52 minus 6 minus 4 leaves 42 weeks, times five is 210 days, minus ten public holidays is 200 billable days. At 6.5 billable hours that is 1,300 hours.

Money side, for a year:

• Private living costs, net: €48,000
• Health insurance and pension contributions: €15,000
• Business costs (software, hardware, insurance, accounting, travel): €12,000
• Income tax and Soli reserve on that profit level: €30,000
• Project-gap buffer, building toward six months of costs: €15,000

Total: €120,000.

Hourly floor: 120,000 / 1,300 = €92.31, call it €93. Day floor: 120,000 / 200 = €600, but that assumes a 6.5-hour billable day. If a client buys days and expects eight hours of your attention, the honest day floor is 8 x €92.31 = €738, and the non-billable 1.5 hours move to the evening. Most people discover here that their day rate and hourly rate were never the same price.

Now the same person with Roland's inputs: six training weeks and 13 Bavarian holidays give 187 days and 1,215.5 hours. The hourly floor rises to 120,000 / 1,215.5 = €98.72, so €99, the eight-hour day floor to €790. Two extra weeks of training cost about €6 an hour. Not an argument against training. Its price, and now you know it.

Every euro above the floor is, in Roland's words, additional profit he did not calculate for, to put toward pension, time off or a new laptop. Every euro below it means working more or spending less. There is no third option.

Where that sits in 2026

The Freelancer-Kompass 2026 puts the DACH average at €103 an hour, down from €104 and without a rise for the first time since the survey began. The freelance.de study lands at €101.70 across more than 3,300 respondents. Its sector averages give you a row to compare with. The day column is the hourly figure times eight; the studies themselves publish hourly rates.

Experience adds less than you would think: under five years about €83, over twenty years about €107.

Then there is the market that looks like yours on paper. The DDIM, the German interim management association, forecasts an average day rate of €1,317 for 2026 across roughly 12,500 interim managers, a market of about €2.7 billion, with utilization recovering from 79% to a forecast 81%. That is around 60% above the €824 you get from multiplying the freelance average by eight.

The gap is no coincidence, and seniority explains only part of it. An interim manager is bought as a mandate: decision rights, a defined outcome, a leadership vacuum to fill. A freelancer is usually bought as capacity. If your work already looks like the first, the benchmark says you may be pricing it as the second. Our guides to calculating your hourly rate and freelance rates across Europe give the wider comparison; this piece is only about the day count.

Keeping the number honest

Roland runs his calculation like an employee's time account. Bill more than 6.5 hours in a day and the surplus goes into an overtime account as extra profit. Bill less, and it comes out.

"If I am ill and cannot work because of it, those are by definition minus hours. They come off the overtime account, or at some point it goes negative if there are too many." (Roland König)

Hard, but consistent. Weekend work on a burning project goes in as overtime. A conference only counts as training if it genuinely taught him something; most of his go into the minus column as networking. Fixed-price jobs are converted back into hours: finish under budget and the difference is overtime, overrun and it is a loss.

The account gives him room to move. When a client postponed a project, he took two weeks off against his balance instead of panicking. Once a year he runs a retrospective on his own parameters: he started at seven billable hours a day and cut to 6.5 once his rate allowed it. The number is a process, not a document.

What to do on Monday

1. Count last year's billable days from invoices. Not from memory. If the number is far below 187, your problem is utilization, and the €103 paradox explains what to do first.
2. Fill in the formula above with your Bundesland's holidays. Ten in Berlin or Hamburg, thirteen in Catholic Bavaria. Write the result where you can see it.
3. Add the buffer line. Even €500 a month toward a six-month reserve moves your floor by a few euros an hour and your negotiating position by a lot.
4. Split hourly floor from day floor. Selling eight-hour days? Multiply by eight. Selling 6.5-hour days? Say so in the offer.
5. Diary the retrospective. One hour in December to check whether 6.5 hours, six weeks and the buffer were right. Then read how the 25% raised their rate before you set next year's number.

The formula tells you what a day must be worth. It cannot fill the days. If the gap between 187 and your actual count is the real problem, a free 9am profile puts you in front of companies across DACH looking for exactly your profile, and every matched project is billable days you did not have to hunt for.

Quotes by Roland König and Joachim Groth translated from German.

Freelance Unlocked is co-organized by 9am together with Uplink and freelancermap. This article draws on the session of Roland König at Freelance Unlocked 2026. Watch the full talk above, and join us at the next edition: freelanceunlocked.com.