Charging clients abroad what you would charge in India? Clients abroad do not compare your rate with your old salary. They compare it with what the same work costs them elsewhere. So set your hourly rate in dollars in three moves: work out the lowest rate that matches your salary, look at what clients already pay for the same work, and quote inside that range, above your floor. Then choose hourly, per project or monthly pricing by the kind of work.
What the client is comparing you against
Earlier this year I spoke with the owner of an agency who needed freelancers for data and automation work. He had more clients than he could handle. When I asked what hourly rate he had in mind, he said the lower end was probably $50 or $60 an hour and the higher end closer to $100. He had already worked with people he thought were solid at about $75. I told him that $50 to $150 an hour is a good range for that work. In his experience, good people were much harder to find than clients willing to pay for them.
That is how a buyer abroad thinks about price. They know what the work costs locally, and in my experience, people in the US pay $100 to $200 an hour for highly skilled people. The same agency owner also expected that a more skilled person at a higher rate would bill fewer hours for the same job. Your rupee salary is not part of that comparison. Why US clients hire freelancers from India shows what my early clients would have paid for the same work at home.
Not every client is paying for skill. On Upwork (opens in a new tab), some clients come for $5 or $10 an hour. But for the work I do, I regularly see budgets of $30 to $50 an hour.
The labour habit: why your salary is the wrong starting point
In a job, you are paid for your time. So when you start freelancing, the natural thing is to price your time the same way: take the salary, divide it by the hours, and quote that. Call it the labour habit. The client abroad is paying for what the work does for their business, and the labour habit leaves that out of the price.
Most of our thought process is how do we charge for our labour versus how do we charge for the value. My brain is like a 1,000-year-old labour brain.
How to raise your rates as a freelancer tells how I broke that habit.
Step 1: work out your minimum hourly rate
Your salary is still useful for one thing: the floor, the lowest rate at which freelancing pays you what your job did. A salary hides costs that your employer pays, such as your laptop, software and internet, your leave and holidays, and the hours spent in meetings. As a freelancer, you also spend hours finding clients and writing proposals, and nobody pays you for those. So the floor is always higher than your salary divided by your working hours.
The rate calculator adds back what a salary hides, then divides by the hours clients will actually pay you for. If you want to quote by the day, the day rate calculator does the same and multiplies the result by a day of paid hours.
With its default numbers: take a CTC (cost to company) of ₹18 lakh and add 30% for the costs your employer covered, which makes ₹23.4 lakh. Say clients pay you for 25 hours a week, for 44 weeks a year. That is 1,100 paid hours, so you need about ₹2,130 an hour. At ₹96 to the dollar1, that is about $22 an hour.
Below that $22, freelancing pays you less than your job did. Step 2 is where you find the rate you actually quote.
Step 2: check what clients pay for the same work
Look up the service you plan to sell on Upwork and Fiverr (opens in a new tab), and note the lowest and highest prices for the same kind of job. How to choose your freelance niche shows how to read that spread. It is often wide: the same kind of project can earn ten dollars from one client and a hundred from another.
Quote inside that range and above your floor. For the automation work I do and coach people on, I suggest not going below $35 an hour. In my experience, the clients below that tend to micromanage and expect a lot of work for very few hours, while clients paying $35 to $50 an hour and more look at the value of what you do. To start with, I would quote $35 to $40 an hour. In your first three months, you are not trying to earn much money. You are trying to win clients and get your first few good reviews. Once you have proved yourself, your next clients might be willing to pay $50.
Here are the levels I see, as hourly rates, honest as of September 2026 and a reference point rather than a promise:
| Where you are | A fair hourly rate | In rupees an hour |
|---|---|---|
| Starting out, with no work to show | Whatever lands the first paid client. Mine was $5 | About ₹4801 |
| Skilled, with some experience of clients abroad | $30 to $50 | About ₹2,900 to ₹4,800 |
| Experienced, pricing on the value you bring | $100 to $200, the rate a local expert charges | About ₹9,600 to ₹19,200 |
I give these as hourly rates on purpose. Freelancing is not a job and nobody works a fixed eight hours a day, so an hourly rate multiplied by a full month of hours gives a figure that few freelancers actually earn. I would not quote US rates to your first clients there, unless you already have good experience of working with clients in the US; Why clients expect Indian freelancers to be cheap explains why a low start should not last long.
Step 3: choose hourly, per project or monthly
The same person can use all three, depending on the work. The table shows how I charge today. These are my own rates, honest as of September 2026, and a reference point, not a promise; I expect them to change. For the hourly rate, $150 is about ₹14,400.1
| How you charge | When it fits | What I have charged |
|---|---|---|
| Hourly | New clients, and work where the size is unclear | $150 an hour today |
| Hourly, lower for a long contract | Repeated work with the same client over months | $100 an hour today |
| Monthly fee | Recurring work, such as running and maintaining systems and automations | A fee of $3,000, $5,000, $7,000 or $7,500 a month from one client, depending on the project (the price of that client's recurring work as of September 2026, not my income) |
| Per project | A piece of work with a clear end, like a website | Earlier, websites at a fixed price each; How to raise your rates as a freelancer tells how that price moved |
Hourly is the easiest place to start, because you do not need to estimate the whole job.
Per project needs an estimate, and when I did not know how to price a project, I worked out how many hours it would take, multiplied that by my hourly rate, and then doubled it. If a job would take 10 hours at $10 an hour, I quoted $200, not $100.
Monthly suits work that never really ends. When you do not know how much work a client will have each month, you can sell your time in blocks of 10, 20 or 30 hours: $30 an hour, for example, with a minimum of 20 hours a month. People advised me to do this, and it worked.
Once you have a starting rate, How to raise your rates as a freelancer shows how to move it up with each new client.
A worked example
Say you are a data analyst in Hyderabad with a CTC of ₹12 lakh, and you want to build dashboards for small businesses abroad.
- The floor. Add 30% for the costs your employer covered, which makes ₹15.6 lakh. Over the calculator's 1,100 paid hours, that is about ₹1,420 an hour, or about $15 at ₹96 to the dollar.1 You will not go below $15.
- The market. Say the dashboard jobs you find on Upwork mention budgets from $15 to $60 an hour, with most between $30 and $45.
- The first quote. You quote $35 an hour, well above your floor and inside the range. The first client agrees without asking about the price.
- A fixed-price job. The second client wants one sales dashboard and a fixed price. You estimate 12 hours. At $35 that is $420, so you double it and quote $840.
- The record. You note every quote and every answer in a list.
Before your next quote
- Put your salary into the rate calculator and write down the hourly floor it gives you.
- Find the lowest and highest price for your service on Upwork or Fiverr.
- Pick hourly, per project or monthly for the next piece of work, using the table above.
- Send your first quote inside the range and above your floor.
Keep a list of every quote you send, with the date, the price and whether the client said yes. After ten quotes, look at how many said yes straight away, and set your next quote from there. For the full list of steps at this stage, see getting set up.