AI Consultant Hourly Rate Calculator

Find the hourly and day rate that replaces a salary, benefits and business costs

FreeNo credit cardResults in 2 minutesUsed by 500+ companies

1. The salary you want to replace

2. The hours you can bill

Result

Hourly rate to charge
$231
Day rate (8 hours)
$1,849
Break-even rate (no margin)
$210
Billable hours per year
1,104

You need $255,163 of billed work a year to cover $219,966 of salary and benefits plus $12,000 of business costs, with a 10% margin. That rate is 3.1x the BLS mean hourly wage for computer and information research scientists on a payroll.

The formula

Salary and benefits = salary x (1 + benefits %)
Yearly cost         = salary and benefits + business costs
Billable hours      = weeks x hours per week x billable %
Break-even rate     = yearly cost / billable hours
Hourly rate         = break-even rate x (1 + profit margin %)
Day rate            = hourly rate x 8
What this number does not include. Income tax, the difference between self-employment tax and an employer's payroll share, local rate differences, unpaid invoices, and the months between contracts. It also does not tell you what clients will pay. It tells you the lowest rate that keeps your numbers whole.

How this works

The calculator starts from what an employee in the same job earns. Wages come from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025 national estimates. BLS has no separate group for AI engineers or AI consultants, so pick the closest one: computer and information research scientists, software developers, data scientists, or management analysts (the group BLS uses for consultants).

Employees also get benefits that a consultant pays for themselves. In BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation for June 2026, private-industry employers paid $32.82 an hour in wages and $14.07 in benefits. $14.07 / $32.82 = 42.9%, the default benefits load.

BLS turns hourly wages into annual pay with 2,080 hours (52 weeks x 40 hours). A consultant bills far fewer. Weeks off, sales, admin and learning all come out of the year, so the weeks, hours and billable share fields are your own assumptions. The rest is arithmetic: yearly cost divided by billable hours, plus your margin.

Worked example with the defaults: $153,930 x 1.429 = $219,966 of salary and benefits. Add $12,000 of costs for $231,966. 46 weeks x 40 hours x 60% = 1,104 billable hours. $231,966 / 1,104 = $210.11 break-even, and x 1.10 = $231.13 an hour (the result rounds it to $231), or $1,849 a day.

Sources

Hiring AI help rather than selling it? AY Automate embeds AI-native engineers in your team from $3K a month. See AI engineer placement or AI strategy consulting.

Frequently Asked Questions

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