Free tool
Global maternity fee hourly calculator
Enter the flat fee you charge for a full course of care and see what it really pays per clinical hour once every visit, the birth and the paperwork are counted.
Free tool, no sign up
Midwife caseload and call coverage calculator
See how many clinical hours a month your caseload really takes and how many days sit between due dates before you agree to another client.
Caseload limits do not break at a headcount. They break at a pattern: three due dates in one week, a prenatal thirty-five minutes in the other direction that cannot move, and postpartum visits that have to happen on day one and day three whatever else is going on. This calculator turns the caseload you are carrying right now into monthly clinical hours and shows how tightly the births are stacked.
The defaults describe a solo practice with twenty-six active clients across all trimesters, four births a month, prenatals that take about seventy minutes including the note, forty minutes of round trip driving per visit, and fifteen hours for a typical birth. Change them to your own and pay as much attention to the days between due dates as to the hours.
Your result
Prenatal and postpartum hours a month
76.3
All routine visit work in a month, driving and charting included.
Birth attendance hours a month
60.0
Attendance only, which is why it looks smaller than it feels.
Clinical hours a week
31.5
Averaged across the month, before phone triage and business admin.
Average days between due dates
7.6
How much recovery sits between births when they arrive evenly, which they do not.
These are clinical hours only, so add your own phone triage, records requests, bookkeeping and continuing education on top.
Reading the days between due dates number
Four births a month averages out to a birth every seven and a half days, which sounds survivable and often is not, because due dates cluster. Two clients conceived in the same fortnight give you two births in one week and then eighteen empty days. The average tells you the load; the calendar tells you the risk, and the risk is what wakes you.
The practical move is to plot every estimated due date on one calendar with a two week window drawn around each, then look at where the windows overlap three deep. That is where you need a named backup midwife who has met the client, not a phone number you hope answers. Many midwives cap intakes per due month for exactly this reason rather than capping the year. Before you accept an intake in a crowded month, add one to the caseload here and see what the weekly figure becomes, because a referral offered in the first trimester is a kindness rather than a rejection.
Where the hours are actually going
For most solo practices the prenatal figure is roughly double the birth attendance figure, which surprises midwives who feel their life is organized around births. Twenty-six active clients at 1.6 visits a month is about forty-two visits, and at a hundred and ten minutes door to door that is well over seventy hours before a single labor starts.
Two numbers move that total more than anything else: travel and charting. Clustering visits geographically, or holding one office day a week, cuts driving without cutting care. Finishing the note at the kitchen table before you stand up removes the second pass entirely, which is worth roughly ten minutes per visit and, on this caseload, close to seven hours a month.
Questions about this calculator
Why does the weekly figure look lower than my week feels?
Because it counts only clinical time. Phone triage, texts at ten at night, records requests, bookkeeping, ordering supplies, restocking the birth kit and continuing education are all excluded. Track those for two weeks and add them yourself, and most midwives find another eight to twelve hours a week hiding there.
How should a two midwife practice use this?
Run it once for the whole practice, then divide the hours by the way you actually split the work rather than evenly. If one of you takes most of the prenatals and the other takes most of the births, the totals hide a real imbalance. Running it separately for each midwife makes that visible before it turns into resentment.
Does this account for transfers and long labors?
Only through the average you enter for birth hours. A transfer that ends with four hours at a hospital and a debrief the next day is much longer than fifteen hours, so if you transfer regularly, raise that figure. Look at your last ten births and use the real mean rather than the number you would like it to be.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The hospital transfer packet checklist
Everything a receiving labor and delivery team needs from you, in the order they will ask for it, so nobody is copying dates onto a legal pad at three in the morning.
The fastest lever is the admin column
Whatever figure this page just gave you, the hours spent re-keying visit dates, retyping a handoff page and charting the same prenatal twice move it more than a fee increase will. In MidwifeLedger the note you write at the kitchen table is the note a receiving hospital reads, and the risk flags fire without you opening three prior visits to find a blood pressure trend. Book a walkthrough, then run this calculator again with a smaller admin number.