2026 edition · for freelancers and service-based sole proprietors
Know what to set aside, before the quarter ends.
A Schedule C organizer for freelancers and consultants: income, expenses and mileage in three logs, a tax reserve worked out from them, and a payment tracker for the four deadlines.
Get it — $29A freelancer with $78,000 of receipts who arrives at their preparer with bank statements but no mileage log, no home-office measurements and no receipt for a laptop loses about $7,912 of deductions — roughly $1,118 in self-employment tax alone, before any income tax. The expenses were all real. The records were not there.
$0.725 a mile through June 30, $0.76 from July 1. Almost every template on the market applies one rate to the whole year, which is wrong for half of it. This one reads the date on each trip and applies the rate that belongs to it.
Self-employment tax is 15.3% on top of income tax, and nobody withholds it for you. The workbook turns your profit so far into a share of every payment to move into a separate account the day it arrives — and keeps that separate from what to actually send at each deadline, which is a different calculation.
Schedule C line 27a arrives from most templates as one lump sum, and the preparer has to ring you to ask what is in it. Here it arrives itemised, alongside a page telling them how every figure was built.
Every figure in the workbook is generated from the same constants file our fifteen calculators read, and each one is printed on the Rates sheet with the IRS page it comes from. Templates with rates typed into cells go stale the year they change, and nobody maintains them. A new edition is published for each tax year.
Other spreadsheets add your numbers up. This one tells you what share of each payment to set aside, which vehicle method is worth more, or what your day counts mean for how the property is treated. That logic is the same logic behind the free calculators on this site.
Every release is put through a structural check, a set of tax regression tests, and a full recalculation of every formula in the file. The last of those found two real defects before anybody downloaded anything.
This is an organizing, recordkeeping and planning tool. It is not tax advice, it does not file anything, and it does not replace a tax professional. It does not cover Inventory and cost of goods sold, the home-office deduction, depreciation schedules, the QBI deduction, payroll, partnerships and S corporations, and state or local tax.
Figures are for the 2026 tax year. Review your final tax treatment with a qualified professional or against applicable IRS guidance.
$29, one payment, yours to keep.
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The tax logic in this workbook is the logic in these — try them first if you want to see how it thinks before you download anything.