Monthly Burn Rate Calculator

The one number your runway depends on

Your burn rate is how much money leaves your accounts in a typical month — everything, business and personal, added together. It sounds mundane, but it's the foundation of every cash-flow decision a freelancer makes. It's the amount your income has to clear to break even, and it's the denominator that turns your savings into a number of months you could survive without work. Get this number right and the rest of your financial planning has something solid to stand on.

Enter your monthly business expenses, your personal essentials, and your personal discretionary spending. The tool returns your total monthly burn, your bare-bones burn (essentials only), and your annual burn.

Why personal expenses belong here

For a freelancer, the wall between "business" and "personal" money is thin. When work is slow, the same savings have to cover both your software subscriptions and your rent. Leaving personal expenses out of your burn rate gives you a comforting but useless number. This tool deliberately includes them — while separating them, so you can also see the figure that matters most in a crisis.

Your bare-bones burn is your superpower

The single most useful output here is your essential burn — business costs plus personal essentials, with discretionary spending stripped away. This is the number you could survive on in a genuinely lean month: rent, food, insurance, utilities, minimum debt payments, and the tools you can't work without.

Why it matters: in a downturn, you can cut to this level fast, and doing so dramatically extends how long your savings last. A freelancer who burns $7,000 a month but could drop to $5,000 essentials has far more resilience than the numbers first suggest. Knowing your floor before you need it means an emergency is a decision, not a scramble.

What's a healthy burn rate?

There's no universal figure — what matters are two ratios:

• Burn versus income. Your burn should sit comfortably below your average monthly take-home, leaving room to save. If burn is close to or above your income, that's the signal to cut costs or raise rates before anything else.
• Burn versus savings. Several months of burn held in cash is the buffer that lets irregular income feel stable. This is exactly what the Runway calculator measures.

Getting the number right

A few practical notes:

• Use typical months. Enter what a normal month looks like, not an unusually cheap or expensive one.
• Average the lumpy stuff. An annual insurance premium or a quarterly tax payment is easiest to fold in as a monthly average so it doesn't distort things.
• Revisit it. Burn drifts — a new subscription here, a rent increase there. Recompute every few months so the number stays honest.

What this is

A budgeting tool, not tax advice. It's a simple sum, but an honest one is worth more than a sophisticated model built on guesses. Feed your real numbers in, and your burn rate becomes the reliable base for your runway, your budget, and your pricing.