Project Profitability Calculator
Compare your flat fee against your logged hours and expenses to reveal your true hourly rate and gross margin.
📖 Understand this document
This calculator tells you whether a project actually made you money. Input your quoted price, actual hours spent, expenses, and hourly rate to see your real profit margin and effective hourly rate.
Key components
- Revenue — what the client paid you.
- Costs — your hours × rate plus any direct expenses.
- Profit margin — the percentage of revenue that's actual profit.
- Effective hourly rate — what you actually earned per hour worked.
Compare plan vs reality. Floor rate is your minimum acceptable effective hourly from the hourly rate calculator.
(5.0 hrs over)
Direct costs
97.6%
Gross margin
| Metric | Quoted (40h) | Actual (45h) |
|---|---|---|
| Project price | $5,000.00 | $5,000.00 |
| Platform fee | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Net revenue | $5,000.00 | $5,000.00 |
| Direct costs | $120.00 | $120.00 |
| Overhead allocated | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| Total costs | $120.00 | $120.00 |
| Gross profit | $4,880.00 | $4,880.00 |
| Gross margin % | 97.6% | 97.6% |
| Tax est. | $976.00 | $976.00 |
| Net profit | $3,904.00 | $3,904.00 |
| Effective hourly | $97.60 | $86.76 |
| ROI | 3253.3% | 3253.3% |
| Realization rateⓘ | — | 88.9% |
ROI = (Net profit ÷ Total costs) × 100. Your ROI: 3253.3%
Budget burn
Budget burned: 112.5% | Project complete: 50% | Status: Over budget
Projected final hours at this pace: 90.0 h
Hours vs budget
Completion
Industry benchmarks (professional services)
- Gross margin: 50–70% typical | Your project: 97.6%
- Net margin: 10–20% typical | Your project: 78.1%
- ROI: >25% healthy | Your project: 3253.3%
- Effective hourly vs floor: Above
✓ This project is financially healthy. Your gross margin of 97.6% is above the 20% minimum benchmark, and your effective hourly rate of $86.76/hr exceeds your floor of $75.00/hr.
What-if price (+0%)
Center = current price. Drag to preview margin impact.
What-if actual hours (+0%)
Saved projects
Pick A and B on two different projects to compare in the center column.
How to use this tool
- Enter the total fixed fee charged to the client.
- Log the actual hours worked multiplied by your base rate.
- Subtract any project-specific expenses.
- Assess whether the project hit your target margin.
Why this matters
Fixed-price projects can be highly lucrative or complete disasters. Tracking profitability post-mortem is the only way to improve your estimating and quoting accuracy for the next client.
What is a project profitability calculator?
A project profitability calculator measures how much money you actually made on a fixed-fee project. It subtracts expenses and divides the remaining revenue by the hours you worked. Freelancers often discover that their "lucrative" $5,000 project actually paid less than minimum wage once scope creep and revisions were factored in.
When do you need to calculate project profitability?
- During the post-mortem phase after delivering a major project.
- When deciding whether to take on a similar fixed-fee job in the future.
- When auditing your portfolio to fire low-margin clients.
Works well with
Capacity Planner
Model weekly capacity against project commitments, see an eight-week forecast, and sanity-check new work before you say yes
Income Tracker
Log payments, chart progress toward an annual goal, export CSV, and celebrate milestones — multi-year view with browser-only storage
Hourly Rate Calculator
Find the minimum hourly rate you need to hit your income goals
Frequently asked questions
Gross margin compares gross profit to revenue after fees. Net margin reflects net profit after tax assumptions as a share of revenue. Both are simplified planning views, not tax advice.
Return on investment here is net profit divided by total costs (direct plus allocated overhead), times 100. It shows profit per dollar of cost in the model.
Quoted hours divided by actual hours times 100. Around 100% means you landed near the estimate; above 100% means the work took longer than quoted hours.
A share of recurring monthly costs (software, rent, subscriptions) attributed to this project so profitability reflects more than variable costs alone.
How much of your hours budget you have used relative to how complete the project is. If hours burn faster than completion, you may finish over budget.
Professional services often reference roughly 50–70% gross margin and roughly 10–20% net margin, but real targets vary by niche, region, and risk tolerance.
Click Save this project to store a snapshot in history. Load a snapshot to restore inputs, or pick two projects as A and B to compare side by side.
Net profit divided by actual hours in the model—your implied hourly yield after fees, costs, overhead, and the simplified tax on profit.