Glossary

The freelance dictionary, written by someone who's done it.

14 terms across money, planning, and forecasting. Each one short, opinionated, and linked to the part of Ensaria that handles it for you.

B C D E K P Q R S W

B

Billable hour

An hour of work that ends up on a client invoice. Usually 50–65% of worked hours for a typical freelancer — the rest goes to admin, sales, and unbilled work.

C

Capacity

How many billable hours you actually have available in a given week, after subtracting recurring work, admin, and recovery time. Almost always 40–60% of the headline workweek.

D

Day rate

A fixed price for one working day, usually 6–8 hours of focused client time. The most common pricing unit for senior freelancers and consultants once they stop tracking hours.

E

Effective rate

Total money earned divided by total billable hours. The number freelancers see when they actually do the math — usually 30–40% lower than the quoted rate.

K

Kickoff drag

The disproportionate time the first week of a project consumes — meetings, brand discovery, repo set-up, brief alignment. Usually 25–40% of total hours for ~10% of total deliverables.

P

Planning fallacy

The robust tendency to underestimate how long a task will take, no matter how often the underestimation has been proven wrong on past tasks. Documented across decades of research.

Project budget

The total hours or money a project should consume — set at quote time, tracked daily, and the single best early-warning signal that a project is going off the rails.

Q

Quoted rate

The hourly or daily rate on the contract. The headline number freelancers know best — and the one that bears the least relationship to take-home.

R

Real rate

Take-home euros per worked hour, after tax, business expenses, and unbilled admin time. Usually 40–60% of the quoted rate.

Recurring work

Work that happens on a schedule — a weekly client call, a monthly maintenance window, a daily check-in. Predictable, easy to underestimate, and the silent driver of "where did my week go?"

Reference-class forecasting

Predicting how long a task will take by looking at how long similar tasks have taken before — rather than guessing from inside the current one. The opposite of the planning fallacy.

Retainer

A recurring monthly fee a client pays a freelancer for guaranteed availability or a defined scope, regardless of how much work materialises that month. The most stable freelance income shape.

S

Scope creep

The slow expansion of project work past the original brief — usually unbilled, usually un-renegotiated, usually the single biggest driver of the gap between quoted and effective rate.

W

Work hours

The hours of the day and days of the week you treat as workable. The boundary that turns a freelance schedule from "anytime is work time" into "this slot is, that one isn't."