Free tool
How many due date windows can you actually hold
Enter your window length, your recovery time and your backup depth, and see how much overlap you are carrying on an average day.
Free tool, no sign up
What your flat birth fee really pays per hour
Enter your fee and the hours a birth client genuinely takes, and see the hourly rate hiding inside the flat number.
A flat birth fee is quoted as one price and delivered as a long list of hours. Two prenatals at two hours each, phone and text support across five weeks, a labor that ran fourteen hours or ran four, a postpartum visit, the drive at 2 a.m. and the drive home at noon, plus the paperwork nobody bills for. When doulas finally add those up, the hourly rate is usually well under what they assumed and often under what they would accept from an employer.
This calculator does not tell you what to charge. It tells you what you are currently charging, per hour, after the money that leaves before you do: your backup retainer, your supplies, your insurance and certification costs spread across the clients who paid for them. What you do with that number is a business decision, but it is a much easier decision once the number exists.
Your result
Total hours this client takes
29.0
Every hour the fee is buying, not just the hours in the birth room.
Fee left after your costs
$1,340
What the client pays minus the money that goes straight back out.
Your real hourly rate
$46.21
Before self employment tax, and before any on call time you were not paid for.
Share of the fee that leaves before you do
A useful check on whether your backup and supply costs have crept up quietly.
These figures cover one birth client only, and they exclude the weeks of on call availability that no flat fee ever really pays for.
The hours doulas forget to count
Almost every doula undercounts the same three things. The first is phone and text support across the last trimester, which rarely feels like work in the moment and adds up to hours by 40 weeks. The second is driving, particularly the second drive when a labor stalls and you go home to sleep before coming back. The third is administration: the contract, the invoice, the birth note, the emails to a partner who has questions.
Add them honestly and a fee that looked like a good rate for a fourteen hour birth turns out to be spread across nearly thirty hours. That is not an argument for charging more by default. It is an argument for knowing which parts of the package are expensive, because that is where you can either raise the fee or trim the scope.
What to do with a rate you do not like
There are only four honest levers. Raise the fee. Reduce included hours, usually by capping prenatals or making the postpartum visit an add on. Cut cost per client, which mostly means renegotiating the backup retainer or buying supplies less often. Or take fewer, better paid clients and stop filling the calendar with discounted births that still consume a full five week window.
The lever most doulas reach for first is the one that helps least: working faster. A birth takes as long as it takes. The rate improves when the package is priced for the hours it genuinely contains, which is why writing the hours down tends to change pricing more than any pep talk about worth.
Questions about this calculator
Should I include on call weeks in the hours?
Not in this calculation, because you would be dividing by a number so large that every doula would look underpaid. On call time is better handled as a separate constraint on how many clients you accept. The capacity calculator on this site is where that question belongs.
How do I split costs for a client my backup attended?
Enter the full amount your backup was paid for that birth in the cost field, not just the retainer. Your real hourly rate for that client will drop sharply, which is accurate: you were paid for a birth you did not attend and paid someone else to attend it.
Does this work for sliding scale clients?
Yes, run it once per fee level. Many doulas discover their reduced fee births are close to break even after costs, which is worth knowing deliberately rather than by accident. It also helps you decide how many reduced fee clients your year can carry.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The on call readiness checklist for doulas
Everything that should be true about a birth client before her window opens, in the order it needs to happen.
Take that figure to a window you are holding now
The result on this screen is true for one client under one set of assumptions you typed in. In DoulaDay the same numbers sit on the due date window itself, next to the signed agreement, the named backup and whether the 36 week balance has landed. Send your inputs over and we will run them against your next open window on the call.