Billable vs non-billable hours: what counts and how to price it in

Every freelancer who bills by the hour works more hours than they bill. The question is which hours a client pays for and where the rest get paid. This post sits in the time and projects hub next to the guide on how to track billable hours; the guide covers the tracking routine, and this post covers the line between billable and non-billable time and what that line does to your rate.

What counts as billable time?

Billable time is whatever your agreement says the client pays for. That sounds circular, but it is the only rule that holds up when a client questions an invoice. If the contract says project management is included in the fee, it is not billable on top. If it says calls are billed at the hourly rate, a 40-minute call is 40 billable minutes. Write the categories down in your proposal or statement of work before the first hour is logged.

The non-billable tasks freelancers forget to count

Sales and admin are easy to remember. The ones that slip through are small and constant: answering a prospect who never signs, chasing a late invoice, rebuilding a file the client sent in the wrong format, onboarding paperwork such as vendor forms, a portfolio update after each project, and the hour every week spent deciding what to do next. None of these belong on a client's invoice, and all of them come out of the week.

A useful reference point: in the 2025 American Time Use Survey, full-time employed people worked an average of 8.1 hours on the days they worked (BLS, released June 25, 2026). An employee's paycheck covers all of those hours. A freelancer's invoices cover only the billable part, so the non-billable part has to be funded by a higher rate.

Recover non-billable time through the rate, not the invoice

Adding an "admin" line to an invoice usually starts an argument, and in some professions it is not allowed at all. Lawyers are the clearest case: ABA Formal Opinion 93-379, quoted by the D.C. Bar in its Opinion 267, says a lawyer who agreed to bill hourly "is never justified in charging a client for hours not actually expended," and general office overhead is not passed on as a separate expense. The North Carolina State Bar calls billing for time not spent "time padding" and billing for unnecessary tasks "task padding," and treats both as dishonest. Freelancers outside law aren't bound by those rules, but clients think the same way.

The fix is to build non-billable time into the hourly rate. Required rate = revenue goal ÷ billable hours per year. The freelance rate calculator does this with your own numbers, and the share of hours you can bill is your utilization rate, explained in what a good utilization rate is.

Billable vs non-billable vs unbilled

Non-billable time is time no client will ever pay for. Unbilled time is billable time you haven't invoiced yet, and it is the expensive mistake: work the client owes you for that never reaches an invoice. Tracking both in one place, with a billable flag on each entry, is what keeps the second kind from leaking. A weekly check of unbilled hours is part of the 30-minute weekly review.

In SoloWOS

In SoloWOS you track billable hours with a timer or by adding time afterward, and each entry has a Billable switch, on by default. Track non-billable work too, with the switch off, so Time Tracking > Reports shows Total hours next to Billable hours for any date range. When you create an invoice, Add unbilled time pulls in only billable, finished entries for the project that aren't on another invoice yet. Clients see your invoice lines, never your non-billable entries.