Three years of experience
is not three years of leverage.
Set your craft, your AI, and what you actually sell. The simulator draws two lines over 36 months: the generic task-taker, and you. The gap between them is the entire lesson, and if there is no gap, that is the lesson too.
Almost everyone believes the same thing about a remote career: grind three years, and three years of experience will quietly turn into a higher rate. It will not. Time is not the variable. This page lets you watch that play out, side by side with the person who chose differently.
Read this before you read a single number.
This is a MODEL. It is not a prediction, a forecast, a promise, or an offer. Nobody can tell you what you will earn, not us, not a salary guide, not a coach. What a model can honestly do is show you the shape of a decision: which choices bend the line, and which ones only feel like they do. Every figure below means 'roughly, directionally, if the model is right'. Treat it as a teaching instrument, never as a plan for your rent.
Why nobody has an honest chart of Philippine freelance rates, including us
There is no authoritative public dataset of Philippine freelancer rates by seniority. None exists. Every "2026 salary guide" you will find is published by a staffing agency, an outsourcing firm, or a training company: pages with no disclosed methodology, no sample size, and a direct commercial reason to skew the number, up if they sell training, down if they sell cheap labour. The base rates in this simulator are the convergent directional picture across several of those sources. That makes them vendor-grade, not survey-grade, and we will not dress them up as anything better.
How soft is that ground? Two vendor guides put the same entry-level bookkeeping role at $5–6/hr and $10–12/hr, a 2x disagreement about one job in one year. The Salary Guide shows the same problem with an even wider spread on support roles.
Your six inputs
Only one of these sets your floor. The other five are multipliers, and a multiplier on a small number is still a small number.
This is an assumption, and FX moves. Change it to whatever today's rate actually is, the peso figures update live. We default to ₱61.5, the BSP rate sampled in mid-July 2026, so check it against today's number before you trust it.
What the model says
Model, not a predictionIn three years, this path pays you roughly what it pays you today.
Look at your line. It climbs for a quarter, and then it is a horizontal ruler for the next thirty-three months. That is not a glitch, it is what a career looks like when the thing you sell is availability. There is nothing underneath to compound, so nothing compounds. You will be busier in month 36 than in month 6. You will not be richer.
At month 36 you and the generic task-taker are earning roughly the same money. Three years, same number. That is the whole point of this page.
Monthly take-home, after the unpaid-time tax
Month 6
$260
₱15,978
$346 billed before the tax
Month 12
$260
₱15,978
$346 billed before the tax
Month 24
$260
₱15,978
$346 billed before the tax
Month 36
$260
₱15,978
$346 billed before the tax
36 months, two lives
Both lines are monthly take-home after the unpaid-time tax below. Same hours. Same client market. The only difference is what the person chose to become.
- If you stay generic
- Your path
- Non-payment risk band
Months from today
The shaded band under your line is not a forecast, it is a warning: roughly one in three cloudworkers has experienced outright non-payment; the full numbers are in the reality tax below. Your line is not a floor.
| Month | If you stay generic | Your path |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | $195 | $195 |
| 6 | $260 | $260 |
| 12 | $260 | $260 |
| 18 | $260 | $260 |
| 24 | $260 | $260 |
| 30 | $260 | $260 |
| 36 | $260 | $260 |
Every multiplier, and where it came from
One of these is sourced. The rest are ours. We are not going to blur the difference, that blurring is exactly how salary-guide pages get built.
Base hourly rate, from your craft
$4/hr
ASSUMPTIONVendor-grade · directional · range $3–$7Vendor-grade and directional. This number, and only this number, is set by your craft. Read the honesty section above before you trust it to two decimal places.
AI, not used
×1.00
ASSUMPTIONNo premium, no penalty. The market does not pay you for abstaining.
Ownership, you bill hours
×1.00
ASSUMPTIONThe reference case. Your ceiling is the clock, and the clock does not get longer.
Language, English
×1.00
ASSUMPTION×1.0. English is the baseline in this market, not an edge.
Clients, US / AU / UK
×1.00
ASSUMPTION×1.0. The base rates already assume this market. It is the reference case, not a bonus.
×0.75 · the unpaid quarter
The ILO found online workers spend roughly 20 unpaid minutes for every paid hour, hunting for work, doing unpaid tests, vetting clients who ghost. About a quarter of your working time earns nothing. Every figure in this simulator is multiplied by 0.75 for it. That figure comes from a 2015–2017 ILO survey, the most recent of its kind, so today's platforms may look better or worse than this snapshot. And a number worth sitting with: average hourly earnings in Asia-Pacific, once you count the unpaid time, came to $2.22/hr.
31% · the people who never got paid at all
Fairwork's Cloudwork Ratings 2025 (Oxford Internet Institute; 750+ workers across 100 countries) found 31% of cloudworkers had experienced non-payment and 38% had experienced late payment. That is not a deduction we can average into a line, it is a risk you either survive or don't. So it is drawn as a band under your line instead. Roughly one in three people get stiffed at least once. Contracts, escrow, and deposits are not paranoia; they are the job.
The numbers were never the hard part.
The hard part is that the highest line on this chart belongs to someone who spent 30 months being worse than they wanted to be, at one specific thing, on purpose. There is no version of this where the line bends and the craft doesn't. Get the real market data, then pick the thing.