If you’re a beginner interpreter or translation professional freelancer who has yet to establish an hourly rate for your translation invoices, the task of placing value on the services you provide can feel overwhelming. However, your hourly rate is a necessary component of any translation invoice—and absolutely critical to ensuring you get paid for your services, on-time and completely.  As you work to establish your hourly rate, there are a number of important factors to consider, each intricately connected to your freelance business operations plan, your unique payment process, and the type of work that you do as a freelancer interpreter. As you consider for how much your time and services are worth billing your clients, research some of the following elements: your credibility and accuracy as a translation professional competition within the translation professional field your bottom-line, or the figure you get after calculating how many resources (both time and money) you spend when fulfilling a project with a client before you make a profit As you research your competition, you should take care to consider how much other translators in your area are charging for similar interpretation services. Avoid under- or overcharging your clients by learning as much as you can about job market competition and making adjustments to your hourly rate depending upon the nature of your freelance translation business and particular specialties, if applicable. Price yourself according to your competition to improve your position within the market both financially and professionally.  The first step in deciding how much to charge for your translation services is to determine your hourly pay rate per service. As a translation professional, the services you provide may be slightly different than those being offered by your competition. Depending on your speciality—which may be written or oral interpretation, professional versus colloquial, or language-specific, for example—your hourly rate may also vary. As you work to establish your hourly rate, it’s essential to keep your bottom-line and return-on-investment in mind at all times. To get this figure, calculate both the time and money you spend in order to fulfil your translation services, including the time spent traveling to a location, for example. Also keep in mind the complexity of a given language when determining your hourly rate, as well as translator availability and demand within your area of operation. From there, you can begin to establish prices according to different services, if applicable. For example, consider the differences in effort required to translate a novel versus interpreting a professional meeting—the former service would likely require many months to complete, while the latter could be performed in a single sitting. Your hourly rate per service should reflect the complexity of the particular type of translation work that you do.  For more complex, longer-form projects that take up more time to complete, such as translating a piece of written content, you will need to establish your billable hour. To do this, freelancers can utilize invoicing software with time tracking functionality to more accurately establish a billable hour per each translation service.