What do I need to charge to actually make money?

No outside benchmark can tell you what your own practice needs, and this page will not pretend otherwise. What it can tell you is the rate your own year requires: your overhead plus what you want to take home, divided by the hours that genuinely turn into money. Enter those three things above and you'll have a floor and a target within a minute. What the market will bear is a separate conversation, and it's one you can only have once you know which numbers you cannot go below.

Because somebody else's rate carries their rent, their staff and their write-off history, none of which are yours. We hold no rate data of any kind: no averages, no state tables, and nothing from our own cost pages. Once you run your own numbers, every result comes from something you typed or a visible default you left in place.

Realization is what survives from the hours you record to the hours you actually invoice. You worked 3.4 hours on the motion, you bill 3, the other 0.4 goes away because you decided the client shouldn't pay for your learning curve. Collection is what survives from the invoice to the bank: the bill you sent that came back at 80 cents on the dollar, or never came back. They are separate leaks and the tool keeps them as separate fields, because a practice that invoices everything and collects half has a very different problem from one that does the reverse.

Plan on the number you can actually reach, not the one that makes the arithmetic comfortable. If you've never measured it, the honest move is to enter your working weeks and hours and then a share of the day you'd bet on. Then check what the sensitivity grid does when that share moves five points. If the answer swings by forty dollars an hour, your rate isn't really a rate yet. It's a bet on an assumption, and that's worth knowing before you print a fee schedule.

Overhead is what it costs to keep the doors open whether or not a matter comes in: rent, your malpractice premium, bar dues and CLE, research and practice-management subscriptions, staff wages and the employer payroll taxes on top of them, marketing, phone and internet, bank and merchant-card fees, equipment, and the bookkeeper. What is not overhead is anything you advance on a matter and get back: filing fees, service of process, courier, e-recording, expert and records fees. Those belong to the client, not to the rate, and folding them in inflates every hour you bill.

Estimate the hours three ways rather than one, and price all three. The panel above takes a best case, an expected case and the version where the other side files something, and gives you the fee each one needs at your own rate. Then it does the reverse: type the fee you were about to quote and it reads back what that number pays you per hour in each scenario. If the overrun case falls under your floor, you'll see it in words. That is the whole argument for doing this on paper instead of picking a round number.

Not quite, and the difference is real money. Write-downs and collection losses are risks of a later invoice. If the full flat fee is paid before work begins and the agreed work is completed, there is no later invoice to write down or chase. Applying the same haircut again would price those risks twice. Switch the payment-timing control and the fee re-solves. Advance payment does not remove the risk that the matter takes longer than you thought, which is what the overrun column is for.

The rules that apply to your practice and your agreement decide where an advance fee has to sit, when it is earned and what must be refunded. Get that answer before you move the money.

Yes, and the practice-type control at the top swaps the vocabulary. Engagement instead of matter, CPE instead of CLE, professional liability instead of malpractice. The arithmetic is identical, because the arithmetic doesn't care what profession you're in: hours worked, hours billed, hours collected, costs, draw. The one thing that changes is the trust-account note, which is a bar rule and doesn't apply to you, so it doesn't appear.

No. There's no account, no email field, no save button and no server to send anything to. The arithmetic runs in your browser and stops there. Close the tab and it's gone, which is why the print and copy buttons exist. The worksheet is yours to keep, not ours to store.