Neuronify
Free calculator · for AI engineers & consultants

Stop guessingwhat to charge

Turn your target income into defensible hourly, day, and project rates — with the utilization math most independents skip and market context from a network that watches real AI engagements close.

Calculate my rates

Your floor rates

$215

per hour

$1,700

per day

$8,500

per week

Based on 1,152billable hours/year. Charge less than this and you’re taking a pay cut to be your own boss.

Market read

Top-tier specialist territory — sustained by referrals, niche depth, and verified outcomes.

Quote projects, not hours

Your two-week engagement floor is $17,000. Serious AI projects start around $25k — which is why we don’t send our network anything smaller.

Sanity check: independent senior AI engineers commonly land at $100–300/hr; verified specialists $150–400/hr. See our rate reference.

Floor rates, not ceilings — what you must charge to hit your income target. Reputation, niche depth, and verified outcomes are what let you charge above them.

Why salary ÷ 2,080 is a pay cut in disguise

The most common pricing mistake independent engineers make is taking their old salary, dividing by 2,080 working hours, and adding a little. A $200,000 salary becomes “$96/hr, so I’ll charge $110 and come out ahead.” You won’t — you’ll come out roughly 40% behind, and it takes about six months to feel it.

The division hides three realities. First, utilization: independents don’t bill 40 hours a week. Between finding work, scoping it, invoicing, and staying current in a field that reinvents itself quarterly, 60% billable is a healthy year — meaning your real billable base is around 1,150 hours, not 2,080. Second, overhead: health insurance, retirement, equipment, software, accounting, and self-employment tax were all invisibly paid by your employer; 25% on top of your income target is a floor, not a padding. Third, gap risk: salaried engineers get paid between projects; you don’t. The premium over an hourly-equivalent salary isn’t greed — it’s the price of the risk you took off your client’s books and put on your own.

Run those three numbers honestly and the same $200k target lands around $215/hr, $1,700/day. That’s not an ambitious rate — it’s the break-even against your old job. It also sits comfortably inside what the market already pays: our AI consulting rate reference puts independent senior engineers at $100–300/hr and verified specialists at $150–400/hr.

The disciplines that command premiums — and why

Rate premiums in AI work aren’t random; they track buyer fear. The disciplines that command 15–20% above generalist rates are precisely the ones where a bad hire is most expensive and hardest for a non-expert to detect in advance: evaluation engineering (whether the system can be trusted at all), agentic-system design (where unsupervised mistakes compound), and AI security (where the failure mode is a headline). Production retrieval work and fine-tuning judgment sit a step below, still above baseline.

Notice these are the same disciplines sophisticated buyers are learning to vet on — our buyer-side scoping pack literally teaches clients to ask which of eight disciplines would sink their project and to grill vendors on those. That’s good news for you if you’re real: a market that learns to detect the difference between genuine depth and confident keywords is a market that pays for genuine depth.

The premium is captured with evidence, not adjectives: production systems you can walk through, failure stories with fixes, numbers you measured. “I’ve built RAG systems” earns baseline; “I cut a retrieval system’s wrong-answer rate from 20% to 4% and can show you the eval suite” earns the premium.

Hourly, day rate, or project price?

Use all three, for different jobs. Hourlyis your internal floor — the number the calculator gives you — for sanity-checking every quote; it’s rarely what you should put in front of a client, because it invites micromanagement of your time and punishes you for being fast. Day ratesfit advisory work, audits, and exploratory sprints where scope genuinely can’t be fixed. Project pricing is where independents make real money: when the scope is defined — and a good brief defines it — a fixed price rewards your speed and experience instead of taxing them.

Two structural rules protect you. Set a minimum engagement — two weeks is a sensible floor, and your calculator output prices it — because context-switching makes small work unprofitable at any rate. And charge for scoping beyond the first conversation: a paid one-week discovery produces a real plan for the client and keeps you from doing free consulting disguised as sales.

Serious projects clear these bars naturally. The engagements we broker start at $25k and average around $75k — work that supports senior rates without apology. If your pipeline is full of $2k gigs from bidding marketplaces, the problem isn’t your rate; it’s your channel.

Holding your number when the pushback comes

Every independent hears the same three objections. The engineers who sustain senior rates aren’t the ones who never hear them — they’re the ones with calm answers ready.

“That’s above our budget.”The answer is scope, never rate: “Understood — let’s find the version of this that fits. Which outcomes matter most?” Cutting your rate to fit a budget teaches the client your number was fiction; cutting scope to fit a budget teaches them every hour of yours is real. If no smaller scope makes sense, a graceful referral beats a resentful discount — and gets remembered.

“Another engineer quoted half.”Don’t argue with the other quote — ask what it includes: “Worth checking what happens after launch in that quote — who handles evaluation, monitoring, and the month-three surprises? That’s usually the difference.” Buyers who still choose the half-price quote were never your clients; a meaningful share come back in a quarter, and the ones who return never negotiate rate again.

“Can you do a lower rate for ongoing work?” Volume discounts are legitimate — but sell them as commitment pricing, not cheaper hours: a retainer with a guaranteed weekly allocation at 10–15% off, minimum three months, paid monthly in advance. You’re not discounting your time; you’re pricing the predictability they’re buying and you’re receiving.

Rate questions, answered straight

What do freelance AI engineers charge in 2026?

Independent senior AI engineers commonly land between $100 and $300 per hour, with verified specialists — production RAG, evaluation engineering, AI security — commanding $150 to $400. Day rates cluster between $800 and $2,500, with the top of that range sustained by referrals and provable outcomes rather than self-description. Rates below $100/hr for production AI work usually signal either offshore arbitrage or an engineer underpricing their own utilization math.

How do I convert a salary into a freelance rate?

Not by dividing by 2,080 — that’s the classic mistake. You only bill a fraction of your working hours (60% is a realistic figure once sales, admin, and learning are counted), you now pay the overhead an employer used to cover (25% or more for benefits, tools, insurance, and accounting), and you carry the gap risk between engagements. Run the real math: required revenue = target income × (1 + overhead), divided by true billable hours. A $200k target works out to roughly $215/hr — not the $96/hr that naive division suggests.

Should I charge hourly, daily, or per project?

Quote projects whenever the scope is defined; keep day rates for advisory and exploratory work; use hourly only as an internal floor for sanity-checking quotes. Project pricing rewards you for being fast and good instead of punishing you for it, and it’s what serious buyers prefer anyway — they’re budgeting an outcome, not renting your hours. Your calculator output includes a two-week engagement floor for exactly this purpose.

Do specializations really command premium rates?

Yes — and the premium tracks what makes buyers nervous. Evaluation engineering, agentic-system restraint, and AI security carry 15–20% premiums because they’re the disciplines where a wrong hire is most expensive and hardest for a buyer to detect in advance. Generalist AI application work is the baseline. The way to capture a premium is evidence: production systems you can talk through, not keywords on a profile.

Should I charge for discovery and scoping?

Yes, once it goes past a first conversation. A short paid scoping engagement — a week, priced off your day rate — protects both sides: the client gets a real plan and honest budget bands instead of a guess, and you avoid subsidizing weeks of unpaid pre-sales. Free discovery is how independents end up doing consulting for free and calling it marketing.

When should I raise my rates?

On evidence, not anniversaries. The three triggers: you’re booked past 75–80% utilization for a sustained stretch (demand says you’re underpriced), your last several projects produced referenceable outcomes, or your specialization deepened into one of the premium disciplines. Raise on new engagements, 15–25% at a step, and tell existing clients at renewal — the ones who leave over an honest raise were the ones underpaying you.

Good rates need good deal flow.

The network exists so engineers like you get qualified briefs — $25k+ projects, scoped before they reach you, no bidding, no race to the bottom. Vetting is real; that’s why the rates hold.

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