- How much self-employment tax you owe on your freelance income
- Your total federal income tax bill once that self-employment tax is factored in
- What your actual monthly expenses look like, income aside
- How fast you can build a 6-month emergency fund to cover slow months
What you'll figure out
Step preview
1
How much self-employment tax do you owe?
Start with Social Security and Medicare tax on your freelance income
2
What's your total federal tax bill?
Add federal income tax on top of your self-employment tax
3
What are your monthly expenses?
Freelance income is irregular, so your budget needs to be precise
4
How fast can you build a 6-month safety net?
Freelance income gaps happen — this is your buffer against them
Start Journey →
Takes about 10 min · Save anytime
Freelancing means no employer withholding taxes, matching your Social Security contribution, or smoothing out your paycheck. This journey walks through the two taxes that hit freelance income hardest, builds a real monthly budget around irregular income, and ends with the safety net that makes the unpredictability survivable.
Who this is for
- New freelancers and 1099 contractors setting up their finances for the first time
- Anyone who's never separated self-employment tax from federal income tax before
- Freelancers without a cash buffer for months when clients pay late or work is slow
Related journeys
Frequently Asked Questions
About 10 minutes. You can pause and resume anytime within the same browser session, and every step you've completed stays saved.
It's pre-filled with your net self-employment income after the deduction for half your self-employment tax, since that's the figure the IRS actually taxes at the federal level, not your raw freelance income.
Enter that income in the "Other W-2 Wages" field in the first step — self-employment tax only applies to your freelance income, but it affects how much of your Social Security wage base has already been used.
Self-employment income in the first step is entered as an annual figure, so it's divided by 12 to give a monthly starting point for the budget step. Freelance income is rarely this even in practice, so treat it as a baseline and adjust it down for a conservative month.
No. Everything stays in your browser's session storage and clears when you close the tab. Nothing is sent to thecalcu.com's servers.
Yes. Go back to any step, change a value, and any step that pulled data from it gets flagged as needing a recalculation, both on that step and on the summary page.
Three months is the common recommendation for salaried employees with predictable paychecks. Freelance income is much less predictable, so this journey targets six months of your actual monthly expenses from the budget step as a more realistic buffer.
Most freelancers with a meaningful tax bill do need to pay quarterly estimated taxes to the IRS to avoid an underpayment penalty. This journey shows you the annual total; divide the combined self-employment and federal tax figures by four as a starting point for each quarterly payment.
It's your freelance revenue minus your deductible business expenses, not your gross invoiced amount. If you haven't tracked expenses separately yet, start with a conservative estimate and revisit this step once you have real numbers.
Check the summary page for all four results side by side, then set aside the combined self-employment and federal tax total from a percentage of every invoice you receive, so tax time doesn't come as a surprise.
Free calculators used in this journey