Free tool
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.
Free tool, no sign up
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.
Three clients a month sounds modest until you count days. A doula who goes on call at 38 weeks and stays on call through 42 is holding a window close to four weeks wide, and she needs a day or two off call after each birth to sleep and be a person. That is roughly a month of on call per client, in a month that contains one month.
This calculator makes the collision visible. It compares the days your clients demand against the days you actually have, and it tells you how many due dates you and your named backups could hold with no overlap at all. Most working doulas run above that line on purpose. The point is to know how far above it you are before you say yes to the next inquiry.
Your result
On call days your clients demand
93
Every client window plus the recovery days that follow her birth.
On call days you actually have
26
A 30 day month minus the days you have already committed elsewhere.
Clients stacked on an average day
3.58
Above 1 means at least one client is sharing your call time with another.
Due dates coverable with no overlap
1
What you and your named backups could hold if no two windows ever touched.
Running above the no overlap line is normal doula practice, but each point of overlap is a night where two labors could start at once and someone gets a backup.
Overlap is not a failure, it is a decision
If you only ever accepted non overlapping windows you would take about one birth client a month, and almost nobody can build a living on that. Overlap is how the trade works. The problem is that most doulas discover their overlap after signing, at 39 weeks, when two clients are both texting about early labor and the friend they were counting on is at a wedding in another state.
Reading the stacking number before you sign changes which client you say yes to. A due date eight days after an existing one is a very different proposition from one twenty five days after, even though both sit in the same month. The calculator will not make the decision, but it stops the decision being invisible.
Backup depth is the real capacity lever
Notice how much the coverable number moves when you change the backup count. One doula with two genuinely committed backups can responsibly hold a schedule that would be reckless alone, which is exactly why doula pairs and collectives exist and why they outlast most solo practices.
The word that matters is committed. A backup who has signed an agreement, knows your fee split, has the handoff sheet, and has blocked the same window is worth counting. A colleague who once said she would help is not, and putting her in this field will give you a comfortable number that does not survive contact with a real 3 a.m.
Questions about this calculator
Why does the tool use a 30 day month?
Because due date windows are measured in weeks and stretch past calendar boundaries anyway, so a fixed 30 day month keeps the comparison steady from month to month. If you want to model a longer stretch, run it for the month with the heaviest cluster of due dates.
What counts as a recovery day?
Any day after a birth when you would not want a second labor to start: the sleep day, the day of the postpartum visit, and for many doulas a third day to catch up on everything that stopped. Set it to what you honestly need rather than what you think you should manage.
Should postpartum shifts count here?
Not directly, but they eat the same days. If you regularly work overnights in the same month, add those nights to the days you cannot be on call, since a doula who worked from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. is not a safe attendant for a birth call that evening.
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.