Find the right
hourly rate

Enter your planned average number of work hours per day. The typical work day for a Spanish full-time employee is about 8 hours. The legal maximum for employees is 9 hours per day. As an autónomo, you are usually not bound by this limitation.

Enter your planned average number of work days per week. The typical work week for a Spanish full-time employee is 5, sometimes 6 days. As an autónomo, you can usually plan your work week as you please.

As an autónomo, not all the work you do is paid ('billable') work. Part of your work will be monthly bookkeeping and other administrative chores, downtime during Internet or device outages, customer acquisition, advertising, research, training and education, et cetera. Estimate here how much of your work will actually be paid work.

If all the hours you entered above will be paid work, enter 100.

A full-time employee in Spain is entitled to 22 working days (30 calendar days) of vacation.

As an autónomo, you are free to choose as many or as few vacation days as you want. Of course, the more days you choose, the higher your hourly rate ends up being.

If you do not want to take any vacation days, enter 0.

Autónomos in Spain get 60%-75% of their 'base cotizable' in sick pay, but that can often be too little to survive and autónomos should either have extra insurance for this, or calculate some reserves into their hourly rate.

Enter here how many sick days you want to plan for in your hourly rate.

If you have separate sick pay insurance, an arrangement with a client that you will get paid on sick days like a regular employee, or want to bear all the risk, enter 0.

Spain has 12 official bank holidays.

When a work day coincides with a bank holiday, regular employees typically get paid anyway. Autónomos typically do not. That's why bank holidays need to be reflected in your hourly rate.

If you have an arrangement with a client under which you will get paid on bank holidays like a regular employee, or you don't care about bank holidays, enter 0.

Enter here the sum of all of your deductible business expenses (but not your Social Security contributions, those are calculated automatically.)

• Purchases like computers and tools*
• Business premises or office
• Work related mortgage costs, interest
• Internet and telephone bills (if separate from private use)
• Software purchases and subscriptions
• Car / transport costs for work purposes*
• Business travel and hotel costs
• Restaurant food during business travel
• Office equipment
• Any additional work-related insurance
• Gestor and consulting costs
• Work-related bank account costs
• Web site, hosting, domains
• Advertising on web sites, in magazines, etc.

Enter here how much you want to actually earn as a gross salary before taxes are subtracted.

This number is roughly comparable with the gross salary of a regular employee, although remember that regular employment still has built-in advantages an autónomo doesn't have, for example job security, unemployment benefits, and severance payments in case of termination.