How to Calculate Your Hourly Rate as a Swiss Freelancer

Your hourly rate — the Stundensatz — decides whether self-employment actually pays. Many freelancers copy a competitor's price or divide their last salary by the hours of a full-time job, and both methods quietly lose money. The honest calculation takes four steps.

Start from the salary you would demand as an employee

Open with a gross annual salary: the figure you would ask an employer for, given your experience and your field. Benchmarking against gross pay is fair, because income tax then applies to you roughly as it would to an employee, canton by canton.

On top come the social contributions an employer would normally co-finance. Self-employed people pay the full AHV, IV and EO contributions themselves: ten percent once income exceeds roughly CHF 60,500, as the SVA Zürich scale shows. Unemployment insurance (ALV) is not owed.

Your own business costs must also be financed out of revenue: hardware and software, insurance, a desk or an office, continuing education, your Treuhänder, and a buffer for illness and slow months. Employees get these things paid or provided; you do not.

Add a margin of roughly five to ten percent for unpaid invoices and price negotiations. A rate calculated without a reserve leaves nothing for the years in which a major client walks away.

Count your billable hours honestly

A year holds about 230 working days once weekends and public holidays are gone. Subtract four to five weeks of vacation — nobody pays for your holidays any more — plus a handful of sick days, and around 210 days remain.

Not every hour of those days is saleable. Administration, offers, acquisition, courses and client calls typically swallow a third of a freelancer's time; the invoice you send only ever shows the productive part.

That leaves roughly 1,000 to 1,200 billable hours per year for a well-organised solo business. Beginners often bill fewer than 800, because finding the first clients is a full-time job in itself.

Write your own estimate down honestly. If you assume 1,500 billable hours because it makes the rate look smaller, the shortfall will appear in your bank account at the end of the year.

The formula, with a worked example

The formula is: target salary plus social contributions plus business costs plus reserve, divided by billable hours. Nothing in it is exotic — it is simply every cost of employing yourself, divided by the hours you can actually sell.

Take CHF 80,000 as the target salary. Add ten percent for AHV, IV and EO, which is CHF 8,000; add CHF 7,000 of business costs and a CHF 5,000 reserve. The revenue the year must produce is CHF 100,000.

Divide by 1,000 billable hours and the result is CHF 100 per hour. That is a floor, not a ceiling: the rate at which your business funds exactly the life you planned.

Compare it with the market before committing. Specialised consultants in Switzerland commonly charge well above CHF 100, and junior services sit lower; a rate far under your floor means the business model, not the arithmetic, needs another look.

Practical rules for quoting your rate

Quote your Stundensatz excluding MWST, the norm between businesses. Below a worldwide turnover of CHF 100,000 you are generally not liable for MWST at all, as the FTA explains — your rate must then cover everything on its own.

For longer assignments quote a Tagessatz of eight hours; clients accept day rates more readily, and you give away less of your non-billable time. For clearly defined packages, a flat fee beats the clock.

Recalculate once a year. Costs, the AHV scale and your own working rhythm all move, and a rate that fitted your first year rarely fits your third.

Once the number is set, keep the billing consistent: every hour logged becomes a position on the invoice. facturio turns your saved rates into correct Swiss invoices and QR-bills, so the rate you fought for is the rate that actually gets billed.