Start here: how much of each payment to put aside for tax, for freelancers and sole traders

Free set-aside calculators for freelancers in eleven countries and a US year-end tax pack: what they estimate, a first ten minutes, and what they leave out.

Start here · 6 min read · Source
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This is not tax advice. The tools below give estimates from the numbers you type and from tax tables the repository holds. Several of those tables were written without a live lookup of the tax authority's site, and each tool says so. Check the figures with your tax authority or a qualified adviser before you rely on them.

This guide is for people paid by clients rather than an employer. A designer who invoices monthly. A plumber or hairdresser working as a sole trader. A developer on contracts. Someone who has just gone freelance and has had no tax taken from a payment for the first time. If nobody is withholding tax for you, the question that matters every time money lands is simple: how much of this is not mine?

The problem, in your words

"Someone told me to save 30%. Is that right for me?" "I spent it, and then the tax bill arrived." "Nobody warned me I'd have to pay part of next year's tax in advance." "Do I need to register for VAT, GST or sales tax yet?"

A flat percentage is a guess. The right share depends on your profit, your country's bands, the social contributions self-employed people pay, and whether you have other income. And in several countries the first bill is bigger than expected because it comes with an advance payment toward the next year. A calculator built from the actual bands answers the question for your numbers.

What you get

There is one set-aside calculator per country, each built the same way: enter what you earn and what you spend, and get the tax, the contributions and the share of every invoice to move aside. Each one also flags the deadlines or registration lines that catch new freelancers out.

  • United States (tool): self-employment tax, federal income tax with the standard deduction, 2026 brackets and the 20% QBI deduction, a flat state estimate, and the quarterly 1040-ES payment with the safe harbour. It also says what to put away from your next $1,000.
  • United Kingdom (tool): income tax with the personal allowance taper, Class 4 National Insurance, student loans and the payments-on-account cash call. It applies the £1,000 trading allowance when that beats your real expenses. Scottish bands are not modelled.
  • Canada (tool): both halves of CPP and CPP2, federal tax, a provincial estimate, instalments and the $30,000 GST/HST small-supplier line.
  • Australia (tool): income tax, the Medicare levy, an optional HELP repayment, PAYG instalments and the $75,000 GST line.
  • New Zealand (tool): income tax, the ACC earners' levy, an optional student loan, provisional tax and the $60,000 GST line.
  • Ireland (tool): income tax after credits, USC, Class S PRSI, preliminary tax and VAT registration.
  • Germany (tool): Einkommensteuer on the 2026 tariff, Solidaritätszuschlag, optional Kirchensteuer, Gewerbesteuer with its credit, Vorauszahlungen and the Kleinunternehmer limit, for Freiberufler and Gewerbetreibende.
  • Netherlands (tool): Box 1 tax after the self-employed and starter deductions, the MKB profit exemption and the main credits, the Zvw contribution, the voorlopige aanslag and BTW/KOR.
  • India (tool): new-regime tax with the section 87A rebate and cess, a comparison of the section 44ADA presumptive scheme with actual expenses, and the advance tax schedule.
  • Singapore (tool): chargeable income and resident tax, with flags for MediSave, Form B and GST registration.
  • South Africa (tool): SARS income tax after rebates and medical credits, provisional tax and VAT registration.

For US freelancers there is also the Freelancer Tax Pack, a year-end tool. It reads what the repository's Invoice Maker, Expense Tracker and Mileage Log keep in the same browser (read-only), or their JSON backups, and lays out Schedule C by line, self-employment tax, a 2026 federal estimate, the quarterly payments still due and which clients should send you a 1099-NEC. It also warns about gaps in your records, such as unpaid invoices or missing receipts.

Your first ten minutes

  1. Open the calculator for your country from the list above. Each one says on the page which tax year its tables are for.
  2. Press "Load an example" first. On the US tool, that fills in a single filer with $120,000 of revenue, $20,000 of expenses and a 5% state rate. Running the tool's own code on that example gives about $27,011 to set aside: 22.51% of revenue, or 27.01% of profit, which it describes as roughly $225 from every $1,000 invoiced, and $351 from the next $1,000 of profit. Seeing a worked answer first tells you how to read your own.
  3. Press "Clear" and type your own figures. Use a year's worth: last year's, or your best estimate for this one. On the US tool that means gross business revenue, business expenses, any W-2 wages and other household income.
  4. Press "Calculate" and read two numbers: the share of each invoice to set aside, and the marginal figure for your next $1,000 where the tool gives one. The second is usually higher, because each extra pound, dollar or euro of profit is taxed at your highest rate.
  5. Read the flags. They point to the deadlines, advance payments and registration thresholds for your country. These are often the reason the first bill surprises people.
  6. Read the section on what the tool leaves to you. On the US page, "What it does, and what it leaves to you" lists what is not decided, from state brackets and credits to retirement deductions and penalties.
  7. Save it. "Download summary (text)" or "Print" keeps a copy, since nothing is stored on a server.
  8. Act on it outside the tool. A common habit is a separate savings account that the set-aside share goes into the day each payment arrives. Whether that suits you is your call.

Cost and data

All of it is free and MIT licensed, with no account. The calculations run in your browser and nothing you type is uploaded. The pages keep a few anonymous feature counts (an analysis was run, the example was loaded, a summary was downloaded) in your browser's local storage only, never with your figures, and a button turns them off. Hosting is best effort with no uptime promise.

What it does not do

  • It is not tax, legal or financial advice, and it does not file anything for you.
  • Some tables were written from memory. The Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa and UK tools say their tables were written from memory or from budget summaries, and the Singapore tool says its tables come from published IRAS figures and memory, the India tool says its slabs were written without a live lookup, and the Germany and Netherlands tools say their 2026 figures come from statute text or published summaries, not a live lookup. Each README names the official site to check against.
  • It leaves out a lot of personal detail. Credits, many deductions, other investment income and local taxes are mostly outside these tools. The US tool lists its gaps on the page.
  • A state or province is a rough estimate where one is given; the US tool takes a single flat rate you type.
  • Rules change every year. A tool marked for one tax year is not right for the next until someone updates it.
  • The tools are prototypes, built by AI coding agents with the repository owner steering.

How to get involved

The most useful contribution from a freelancer or an accountant is a correction with a source: a band, rate or threshold that differs from your tax authority's published figure, with a link to the page. A worked comparison helps too: you ran your own numbers here and in official software or your adviser's workings, and the totals differ by this much. And if your country has no calculator yet, say which and what its self-employed people find hardest.

Send ideas through the feature form and wrong figures through the bug form. Leave your personal financial details out of any issue, because issues are public. An idea is weighed, with no promise it gets built. Fork pull requests are reviewed by the maintainer by hand; the repository's AI agents never act on them.

Where to go next

The rest of the series is on the hub page: Start here.

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