Editorial standards
This site publishes tax figures and rate benchmarks that people use to make real decisions about their income. That deserves stated rules rather than implied ones. These are ours.
Where the numbers come from
Tax figures come from the national authority that sets them — the IRS, HMRC, the CRA, the ATO, the Estonian Tax and Customs Board, the Portuguese and Polish finance ministries, and their equivalents. Where an authority publishes nothing usable in English, or renders its figures in a format we cannot verify, we fall back to PwC's Worldwide Tax Summaries and say so on the page.
Rate benchmarks come from industry surveys with disclosed methodology: the Editorial Freelancers Association, ProCopywriters, the Society of Virtual Assistants, YunoJuno's booking data, ITJobsWatch's contract postings. Every figure on the site carries its source, the year it describes, and the sample size where the publisher discloses one.
What we refuse to publish
A figure with a sample too small to support it. We have excluded widely-quoted rate medians built on five and six responses, because a median from six observations is noise wearing a number's clothing. Those exclusions are recorded in our data files so that a future editor does not "rediscover" them and add them back.
A plausible estimate standing in for a fact. When we could not verify a 2026 figure against a primary source, the country carries a confidence flag and the specific gap is named. In our 15-country tax research, France's €100,000 column is deliberately blank rather than modelled outside the regime ceiling that applies to it. Publishing nothing is better than publishing something that looks authoritative and is not.
Employment data dressed up as freelance data. Government wage statistics largely exclude the self-employed — for photographers, two thirds of whom are self-employed, the official median describes the employed minority. We use those figures for context only, and label them as context on the page.
When figures are updated
Tax data is reviewed when new thresholds are published, which in practice means each January for calendar-year systems and each April for the UK and Australian tax years. Every country edition shows when its data was last reviewed. Rate surveys are updated as new editions are released, which is typically annual and sometimes slower.
What we simplify, and why we say so
Every calculator simplifies. Our US tax figures are federal only, so state tax comes on top. Our Canadian estimate assumes a flat provincial rate, which real provinces do not have. Our cross-country research covers national systems and excludes regional, municipal and church taxes because they vary within a country. In each case the simplification is stated on the page where the number appears, not buried in a footer.
Independence
This site may carry advertising, and may in future earn commission from tools we recommend. Neither affects which figures we publish or how we source them. No advertiser has ever been given the ability to review, alter or veto our numbers, and none will be. Where a commercial relationship exists, we will disclose it on the page it appears on.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong or out of date, please tell us — corrections take priority over everything else, and we would rather be right than consistent. Emailhello@thefreelancecalc.com or use the contact page. Include the page and the source you believe is correct if you have one, and we will fix it and note the correction where it matters.
Our research datasets are published under a Creative Commons Attribution licence with the underlying data downloadable, specifically so that anyone can check our arithmetic rather than take it on trust.
Who writes this
The site is built and maintained by Moe Husseini, software developer and founder, Zin Solutions. He has worked both sides of the freelance relationship, pricing his own contract work and hiring independent contractors, and builds and maintains the FreelanceCalc calculators and the tax datasets behind them.
We are not accountants, tax advisers or lawyers, and nothing here is professional advice. For decisions with real consequences — incorporation, large contracts, disputes — pay a qualified professional in your jurisdiction. See ourfull disclaimer.