How the true hourly rate is worked out
Take everything a hustle brought in, subtract everything it cost you, and divide by every hour it took. The costs are the ones that come out quietly: platform fees, supplies and gear, gas, the subscriptions it needs. The hours include the unpaid ones too: driving to the job, prep, messages, invoicing. If you only count the hours someone paid for, every hustle looks better than it is.
The calculator uses one month because that's the shortest stretch where costs even out. A tank of gas or a box of supplies bought on Tuesday would make Tuesday look like a loss and the rest of the week look like a windfall. Over a month, recurring costs land once and one-off costs spread across the work they paid for.
An example
A food delivery hustle takes in $124 over 7.4 hours. That's $16.76 an hour before costs. Then $85 of gas comes out, and it's $5.27 an hour.
That's an illustration, not an average. But it's the shape of the problem: the hustle that feels busiest can be the one paying least per hour, and you can't tell which one it is until you do the math.
What this calculator can't do
It works on one month you type in from memory. Real hustles are messier:
- Invoices and royalties that pay out weeks after the work.
- Costs that recur every month, and one-off costs that shouldn't sink a single week.
- Hustles in different currencies, which shouldn't be added together.
- A rate that moves every time you log another shift.
That's what RealRate is for. It's a side hustle tracker for iPhone that keeps this number live for every hustle, from what you actually log.