Time tracking and billing
Bill every tracked hour at its rate — billable vs non-billable time, invoices and client reports.
See time tracking and billingFree tool for agencies, consultants and freelancers
Billable Hours Calculator
Log the week as you worked it — every call, sprint and internal meeting — and the invoice on the right fills itself: billable hours times your rate, rounded the way you bill, with the hours you can't charge for shown as what they cost you.
Your time entries
Type hours as decimals (1.25 = 1 h 15 min). Switch off the entries you can't bill — they stay in the week, not on the invoice.
Up to 20 entries.
Amounts show in US dollars only for display — the math is the same in any currency. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Your billable ratio against the benchmarks
Billable hours divided by hours worked. The ladder shows where agencies, consultancies, freelancers and law firms usually land — and the dashed line is your week.
Freelancers
50–60 %
Sales, admin and invoicing eat the rest of the week.
Agencies
65–80 %
Most agencies set 70–75 % as the target for client-facing staff.
Consultancies
70–85 %
Project-staffed teams run the highest ratios.
Law firms
75–85 % target
Annual targets of 1,700–2,000 hours imply it — surveys show many lawyers bill far less of their day.
A low ratio is not always a problem: a week with a big proposal or onboarding in it will dip. A low ratio every week means the rate is carrying too much unbilled time — raise it, bill more of the work you already do, or cut the non-billable hours.
Two ratios matter: the billable ratio above (what share of your time could be billed) and the realization rate (what share of billable time actually got invoiced after rounding, discounts and write-offs). This calculator shows both — the “written off” line is the gap.
Plan backwards
How many billable hours do you need?
Start from the yearly target — 1,500 hours for a boutique firm, 1,800–2,000 for a large one, whatever your agency budgets per person — and see what it means for a week and a day at your billable ratio.
37.5billable hours a week
7.5billable hours a day
10hours at work a day
$135,000billed a year at $75 an hour
7.5 h
2.5 h
Over 48 working weeks. Every hour of the day strip that isn't purple is time you must be at work without billing it.
The ratio only improves when the non-billable hours are visible. WebWork logs billable and non-billable time per project as your team works, and turns approved timesheets into invoices — see how it handles time tracking and billing for client teams.
Start tracking billable hoursHow to calculate billable hours
Log every block of work as a time entry — the task, who it was for and how long it took. Decimals are easiest: 1 h 15 min is 1.25 hours.
Mark each entry billable or not. Work done for a client under an agreement is billable; sales, admin, internal meetings and your own learning are not.
Round each billable entry up to your billing increment — exact minutes, 6 minutes (a tenth of an hour, the legal standard), 15 or 30 — and add the billable entries up.
Multiply billable hours by the rate for each entry, apply any discount and tax, and you have the invoice. Divide billable hours by all hours worked for your billable ratio.
For the long version — methods, industry practices and the spreadsheet way — read the guide to calculating billable hours.
The billable hours formula
Billable hours × hourly rate = amount due
Billable hours ÷ hours worked = billable ratio
Your week: 29.5 h × $75 = $2,212.50 · 29.5 ÷ 38 = 78 %
What counts as billable
- Billable
- Work done on the client's deliverables — design, code, drafting, research for their matter
- Client meetings, calls and emails about their project
- Revisions and reviews they asked for
- Travel and project management, if the agreement says so
- Non-billable
- Proposals, pitches and sales calls for work you haven't won yet
- Internal meetings, admin, invoicing and bookkeeping
- Training, learning a tool, your own marketing
- Fixing your own mistakes — unless the contract says otherwise
Unsure about a grey area? Billable vs. non-billable hours goes through the usual ones.
Rounding increments, made visible
Drag the minutes and watch what each increment turns them into. Rounding up is the convention — the 6-minute increment alone adds a few percent to a year of invoices, so say which one you use in the contract.
37 min
- Exact 0.62 h $46.25 at your rate
- 6 minutes (0.1 h) 0.7 h $52.50 at your rate
- 15 minutes 0.75 h $56.25 at your rate
- 30 minutes 1 h $75.00 at your rate
Law firms bill in tenths of an hour: 6 minutes is the smallest unit, so a 7-minute email becomes 0.2 h. Agencies and consultancies mostly round to 15 minutes, freelancers often bill exact minutes from a timer. None is wrong — what matters is that the client knows, and that you apply it to every entry the same way.
Rounding also explains why “billed hours” on an invoice can be higher than the hours in your timesheet. The calculator keeps both: the hours you worked, and the hours you bill after rounding.
Explore WebWork
This calculator is one small piece of WebWork — a full time tracking and billing platform for client teams.
Agency time tracking
Client hours, project budgets and billable rates for agencies — utilization and profitability in view.
See agency time trackingTime tracker for freelancers
Track your own hours across clients and projects, then turn them into invoices and reports.
See the freelancer time trackerProject time tracker
Hours and labor cost per project and task, measured against budget — what each project really costs.
See project time trackingBillable hours — FAQ
Billable hours are the time you spend on work a client pays for — design, development, drafting, consulting, their meetings and revisions — tracked against an hourly rate. Everything else you do to run the business (sales, admin, internal meetings, learning) is non-billable: it costs you time but goes on no invoice.
Log each block of work as an entry with its duration, mark the entries a client can be charged for, round each billable entry up to your billing increment, and add them up. Multiply by the rate for the amount due; divide by all hours worked for your billable ratio. The calculator above does exactly that as you type.
It depends on the business. Agencies usually target 65–80 % for client-facing staff, consultancies 70–85 %, and freelancers land around 50–60 % once sales, admin and invoicing are counted. Law firms set yearly targets (1,700–2,000 hours) rather than a ratio. Below 50 % for a whole team usually means the rate is carrying too much unbilled time.
A full-time year is about 2,080 paid hours (40 × 52). Nobody bills all of it: at 75 % billable on 48 working weeks that is roughly 1,440 hours; a 1,800-hour legal target on the same calendar means 37.5 billable hours a week — about 10 hours at work a day if three-quarters of them are billable. The planner on this page turns any target into a week and a day.
The convention is to round each entry up to the next increment — a 7-minute call billed in 6-minute increments is 0.2 h. It is accepted as long as the increment is stated in the engagement terms and applied consistently; rounding in your favour on every entry while claiming exact time is not. Over a year, rounding adds a few percent to invoices, which is why clients ask.
One tenth of an hour — the standard billing unit in law firms and some accounting practices. Time is recorded as 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 hours and so on, and the smallest chargeable unit is 0.1 h even for a one-minute email. Choose “6 minutes (0.1 h)” in the calculator to bill that way.
If they are about the client's work and your agreement covers them, yes — a status call, a review meeting or an email thread about their deliverable is billable time. Internal meetings, sales calls with prospects and general admin are not. Travel and project management are billable only if the contract says so.
Billable hours are the hours that could be charged — the entries you marked as client work. Billed hours are what actually lands on the invoice after rounding, discounts and write-offs. The share of billable time that gets invoiced is the realization rate; the “written off” and “added by rounding” lines in the calculator show both directions of that gap.
Track as you work rather than reconstructing the week on Friday — memory drops the short entries, and short entries are where billable time leaks. Run a timer per project or client, mark each entry billable or not at the moment you log it, and review the week before invoicing. A time tracker with billable rates per project does the rounding and the invoice for you.
No. Everything runs in your browser and nothing is sent anywhere; refresh the page and the sample week comes back. Use “Copy summary” to keep the numbers, or sign up for WebWork if you want the entries saved, tracked automatically and invoiced.