Freelancer Tax Tracker spreadsheet

What's inside

• Income log: 1,000 rows for every payment you receive, with a 1099 flag so you can compare against the 1099-NEC and 1099-K forms you get in January.
• Expense log: 2,000 rows. Pick the Schedule C line from a dropdown that lists every expense line on the 2026 Schedule C, plus cost of goods sold and the home office. Enter business meals at full cost; the sheet counts the deductible 50%.
• Summary: income and expenses in Schedule C order, by estimated-tax period and for the year, down to net profit (line 31). Handy at tax time, whether you file yourself or hand it to a preparer.
• Estimate: the Form 1040-ES Estimated Tax Worksheet and Self-Employment Tax Worksheet, line by line. It covers self-employment tax and the Social Security wage base, the half-SE-tax deduction, the standard or itemized deduction, the QBI deduction, the brackets, and the 0.9% Additional Medicare Tax. Then it applies the safe harbor rules and the $1,000 rule to give your quarterly payment.
• Set aside per $1: the share of each payment you receive to move into savings for federal tax, worked out from your own numbers.
• Payments: the four due dates, what's required by each, what you've paid, and a status that turns red if you fall behind.
• Tax years 2026 and 2027 for all four filing statuses, including W-2 wages from a job, a spouse's wages, and withholding. The numbers are on a Tax Tables tab with their IRS and SSA sources.

The estimate uses the same math as our free quarterly estimated tax calculator. Before release, we checked the spreadsheet against it on hundreds of tax situations (both years, every filing status, W-2 wages, losses, high incomes), and every formula was recalculated in Excel with no differences.

Estimated tax periods aren't calendar quarters

The IRS splits the year into four uneven periods, and the payment for each one is due a couple of weeks after it ends. The tracker totals your income and expenses by these periods, so you can see what each payment covers.

2026 dates from the 2026 Form 1040-ES. *Jan 15, 2028 is a Saturday and Jan 17 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so the payment moves to the next business day; we'll confirm it when the IRS publishes the 2027 Form 1040-ES.

You avoid the underpayment penalty if what you pay by each date adds up to at least a quarter of the required annual payment: the smaller of 90% of this year's tax or 100% of last year's (110% if last year's AGI was over $150,000). Using last year's tax is the simplest safe harbor, because it doesn't change when your income does. The tracker shows both and uses the smaller.