The Fractional Desk · Free Tool

Your old salary is not your new day rate.

Most People leaders who leave a $250,000 role price themselves at around $1,000 a day. That number is roughly half of what it needs to be — because it quietly assumes someone else is still paying for your taxes, your benefits, your downtime, and every hour you spend selling.

2 minutes Built for independent HR & People executives · Created by Trellis Usher

What you need

What you want to actually keep, after tax. Not your old gross salary — the number you lived on.
Federal, state, and the self-employment tax your employer used to split with you. 30–40% is typical.
33%
Health insurance, retirement contribution, disability, life. The invisible raise you gave back.
LLC and accounting, E&O and liability insurance, software, website, CRM, travel you eat, memberships, certifications.

What you can actually sell

52 minus holiday, sick days, and the weeks you will not want to work. Be honest — you left partly for this.
46
Total working days — including the selling and admin, not just client delivery. Most people say five and mean four and a half.
5.0
Business development, proposals, admin, invoicing, LinkedIn, building your own IP. In year one this is often 40%.
35%
Of the days you have available to sell, what share do you actually fill? Year one is often 55–65%; an established practice runs 75–85%.
75%

Your number

Minimum viable day rate
$0
to hit your target, at your stated capacity
Hourly equivalent
$0
at 8 billable hours
Monthly retainer
$0
for 4 days a month
Billable days a year
0
what you actually sell
Revenue required
$0
gross, before anything
Target take-home$0
Tax set-aside$0
Benefits you now fund$0
Business overhead$0
Gross revenue required$0
The gap nobody warns you about

Priced the way most people do it — old salary divided by working days — you would have charged $0 a day. Your real number is higher by:

0%

That difference is not greed. It is the cost of everything your employer was quietly paying for.

Why the number lands higher

Three costs that were invisible when you were on payroll.

None of this is padding. Every line was already being paid — just not by you.

The employer half

Your employer paid half your FICA, most of your health premium, and a retirement match you probably stopped noticing. Now all of it comes out of the same rate card.

The unsold days

You were paid for 260 days a year whether the work was there or not. Independent, you are paid for the days you sell — and in year one that is rarely more than two-thirds of what you could deliver.

The work behind the work

Proposals, discovery calls, invoicing, chasing invoicing, building the deck you will reuse eleven times. Real work, billable to nobody. It has to live inside your day rate.

If this was useful

There are four more tools like it.

The transition playbook for going independent, three prompt libraries for running a practice, and ready-made Claude Projects. All downloads, from $27. See the tools →

Want the version you can send to a client?

I'll email you a one-page rate justification — your number, the assumptions behind it, and the language to use when a buyer asks why it isn't lower. Plus the pricing conversation script that keeps you from discounting on the call.

One email, then a short weekly note for independent People leaders. Unsubscribe whenever.