Billable hours calculator

A billable hour is time that the client can be charged for under the engagement letter. Advice, research, drafting and hearings clearly qualify, but so do the short tasks around them, such as a call with opposing counsel, reading through an email chain or a note to the file. Those short tasks are the ones that most often go unrecorded, because each one seems too small to write down at the time.

Some time sits in between. Whether travel, waiting at court and internal discussions about a matter can be billed depends on the engagement letter and, for many corporate clients, on their billing guidelines. Work for the firm rather than for a client, such as business development, training, supervision and administration, is non-billable. So is time on a fixed-fee matter, although many firms still ask for it to be recorded so they can see whether the fee covered the work.

An annual target only becomes useful once it is divided by the days you will actually work. Holidays, public holidays, sickness and training usually leave 46 to 48 working weeks. At 48 weeks of five days, 1,800 hours a year is 7.5 billable hours a day and 37.5 a week, 1,900 hours is 7.9 a day and 2,000 hours is 8.3 a day.

The number of working weeks matters more than it seems. At 46 weeks instead of 48, the same 1,800 hours comes to 7.8 hours a day. A target is set for the year but met or missed one day at a time, so a slow month has to be made up later at a higher daily rate. The table above breaks every common target down with the weeks, days and billable share you enter in the calculator.

Not every hour at work can be billed, because the same day also holds non-billable work, internal meetings and breaks. If three quarters of your time at work ends up billable, 7.5 billable hours take 10 hours at work. If two thirds of it does, they take 11.3 hours. The billable share field in the calculator turns a target into the length of day it really asks for.

The averages suggest that most lawyers bill far less of their day than targets assume. Clio's Legal Trends Report 2025 puts the average utilization of lawyers on its platform at 38%, which is about three billable hours in an eight-hour day. To work out utilization, realization and collection from your own figures, use the utilization rate calculator.

Most firms round each time entry up to the next billing unit, and each entry is rounded on its own. The effect is therefore largest on a day made up of many short entries. Three entries of 7, 22 and 65 minutes add up to 1 hour 34 minutes of work. In six-minute units rounded up, they bill as 0.2, 0.4 and 1.1 hours, which is 1.7 hours and 8 minutes more than was worked. Rounded to the nearest unit, the same entries bill as 1.6 hours.

Ten two-minute emails show how far this can go. They are 20 minutes of work, yet they bill as a full hour in six-minute units and as 2.5 hours in fifteen-minute units. Clients who audit their bills look for exactly this pattern. The billable hours chart shows what every minute from 1 to 60 bills as, and the billing increment chart sets the 6, 10 and 15-minute brackets side by side.

Billable work that is never recorded is never billed, and it does not show up anywhere as a loss. Twenty minutes a day at 350 an hour, over 240 working days, comes to 80 hours, or 28,000 a year. The unrecorded minutes field in the annual target view works out the same figure for your own rate and working year.

Most of this time is short work done between larger tasks, such as a call that was never noted or an email answered on a phone. Time written up at the end of the day or the week has to be reconstructed from memory, and those short tasks are the first to be forgotten. Recording time as you work, or letting Sixminute draft the entries from the work itself, keeps the timesheet close to the day as it happened.