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Freelance & Remote Rate Calculator (Nigeria)

The obvious calculation — divide the salary you want by the hours you work — produces a rate that will quietly leave you short every single month. It ignores the platform fee, the payment fee, the hours you spend finding work, the weeks you are not working at all, and the pension contribution your employer no longer makes for you. This prices all five in.

💻  Calculator

$5.73

per hour in naira at the exchange rate you set: ₦7,586

Hourly rate to quote $5.73
Same rate in naira per hour ₦7,586
You must bill per month ₦758,621
You must bill per month ($) $573
You must bill per year ($) $6,881
Lost to platform fees ₦75,862
Lost to payment conversion ₦22,759
Total lost to fees 13.0%
Pension you are self-funding ₦60,000
Billable hours per year 1200
Equivalent salaried gross ₦652,174

This works out to under $10 an hour before tax. After PAYE and your own pension, that is a hard number to live on full-time.

Works without JavaScript — the figures above are a worked example using the default values.

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Before you rely on this

  • This does not deduct PAYE. A freelancer earning this much owes personal income tax under the Nigeria Tax Act 2025, so the take-home target you enter should be a post-tax number you have already worked out with the take-home pay calculator.
  • The exchange rate is the single biggest lever in this calculation. A rate that moves 10% moves your effective pay 10%, and you carry that risk, not your client.
  • The equivalent salaried gross figure grosses up for the 8% employee pension only. It is a floor for comparison, not an exact equivalence.

How this is calculated: Calculator logic in assets/js/calc-core.js, verified by the test suite in tests/calc-core.test.js. Rate inputs are prefilled from the figures below. · Data as of 2026-09-10
Prefilled rates are national reference values. Your own receipt, payslip or pump price always overrides them.

Frequently asked questions

How do I calculate my freelance rate in Nigeria?
Start from the naira that must reach your bank account, add the pension contribution you no longer receive from an employer, then gross up for platform and payment fees. Divide by the hours you can genuinely invoice across the weeks you actually work. Dividing your target by 160 hours instead skips every one of those steps and understates the rate by 40% or more.
What is a good hourly rate for a Nigerian freelancer?
It depends entirely on your skill and market, but the arithmetic here shows why "good" is a naira question, not a dollar one. A $6/hour rate at ₦1,323 is roughly ₦7,900 an hour, which sounds strong until you subtract tax, fees and the weeks you are not working.
Should I charge in dollars or naira?
Charging in dollars transfers exchange-rate risk to you but protects your purchasing power over time. Charging in naira is simpler but a devaluation between quoting and being paid can erase your margin. Either way, build the conversion into your rate rather than discovering it when the money arrives.
How many hours a week can a freelancer actually bill?
Far fewer than they work. Finding clients, proposals, admin, invoicing and chasing payment are all unpaid. Twenty to thirty billable hours out of a forty-hour week is a realistic full-time assumption; anything above 35 is usually a sign the calculation will be wrong.

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