How to become a freelancer in 2026? You plan to start a freelance business and you want to know how to do it? This guide is for you. Here are our best tips for starting your freelance career step by step.
Every month, thousands of freelancers find missions on our freelance platform Codeur.com. Drawing on this experience, we share with you in this guide all the advice for getting your freelance business off to a good start in 2026.
The summary:
Becoming a freelancer in 2026 has never been so accessible… but so competitive. Every month, thousands of people get started. However, many quickly give up due to lack of method, clients or sufficient income.
In this complete guide, you will discover how to become a freelancer step by step, choose the right status, set your rates and above all find your first clients quickly. Whether you are an employee, student or retraining, this guide gives you a clear method to get started.
Freelancing is becoming more and more attractive for several reasons:
- Freedom of organization
- Choice of missions and clients
- Higher earning potential
- Ability to work from anywhere
But be careful: this freedom also requires discipline, organization and resilience.
Steps to becoming a freelancer
Before getting started, it is essential to structure your approach. Becoming a freelancer is not just about choosing a status or finding a first client: it involves laying solid foundations to build a viable and sustainable activity.
Define your positioning
Before getting started, it is essential to clarify your offer. It's not just about defining a profession (developer, editor, designer), but specifying the problems you solve, your target, without forgetting your added value.
Clear positioning facilitates prospecting and improves your visibility.
Choose a suitable freelance status
Before you start, find out about the different statuses for freelancers. Which one best suits your project, your experience and your context. The choice of status depends on your situation and your objectives:
- The micro-enterprise is particularly suitable for getting started. It allows you to test your activity with simplified procedures;
- Companies (SASU, EURL) are more suitable for freelancers aiming for more structured development;
- Salary portage offers a compromise between independence and security, while retaining the advantages of employment.
It is recommended to compare the tax and social implications before making your choice.
Becoming a freelancer: setting your rates
Setting prices is a strategic step. It is important to take into account: charges, non-billed periods as well as income objectives.
For example, to aim for a net income of 3,000 euros per month, it is often necessary to generate around 5,000 euros in turnover, depending on the status.
This involves setting a daily rate consistent with your market and experience level. Calculate your average hourly income and have an idea of the turnover to bring in per month to live properly. Does this seem possible to you? Perfect, let's continue.
Use a free invoicing tool such as invoice.net.
Becoming a freelancer: quickly finding your first clients
💡 Tip: start with short, concrete missions on Codeur.com to accumulate references and customer reviews, which will make it easier to obtain more ambitious projects later.
Business development is one of the most important aspects of being successful in freelancing. Obtaining your first missions can be a real challenge, but there are several levers to get started effectively:
- Specialized platforms : they allow you to access missions corresponding to your profile and your expertise, this is the case with Codeur.com;
- Professional social networks : Feeding your LinkedIn account, for example, is ideal for making yourself known, developing your network and, above all, getting in touch with potential clients;
- Direct prospecting : sending targeted proposals to companies or responding to calls for tenders remains an effective strategy for landing missions.
“By doing things well, by striving to succeed in projects thoroughly, by truly seeking to satisfy the client, we create an image of quality. And it is thanks to these small projects that I did at the beginning, on which I was able to prove the quality of my work, that today I can make a living from it.”
Victor Weissabout Codeur.com
How to develop your freelance business?
Once you have become a freelancer and have obtained your first missions, it is crucial to structure your activity to ensure its growth and sustainability.
Establish solid foundations
Quickly create a portfolio, formalize your offers and standardize your processes (quotes, onboarding, customer follow-up). These elements facilitate daily management and strengthen your credibility with customers.
Manage your time effectively
A significant part of your activity will be devoted to non-billable tasks such as prospecting, administration or communication. A rigorous organization will allow you to optimize your profitability and devote more time to missions with high added value.
Work on your customer relations
Satisfying your clients is a key lever for developing your freelance business. Clarify needs from the start, frame missions and don't hesitate to ask for recommendations to generate new opportunities.
Learn about good practices
Explore the web to find information, feedback and useful training, whether on starting a freelance business, prospecting and managing clients, or personal development, including organization, efficiency and productivity.
Here are some recommended readings:
Freelance: organize your days for better productivity
As you have surely seen in the creation of your hourly rate average, you will not spend 100% of your working hours creating added value.
Thus, a large part of the success of your activity will consist of organizing your time correctly and eliminating, simplifying or subcontracting as many low-value-added tasks as possible.
To manage your time, we have shared tools for making “to do lists” and working as a team.
To manage low value-added tasks, here is a list of tools that will allow you to subcontract or simplify the different tasks:
To go further, do not hesitate to consult our guide to finding new clients.
Good practices
We regularly share tips and best practices to help you become a better freelancer.
But, if I had to give you one last piece of advice, it would be to never stop learning. Be curious and take the time to deepen your knowledge, your skills and your personal development.
Also read: The 12 best tools for freelancers
The pros and cons of freelance life
What are the pros and cons of freelance life? Freelancing offers many opportunities, but also has challenges that are important to know before starting.
The advantages of becoming a freelancer
If you don't build your own dream, someone will hire you to build theirs.
One of the main advantages of freelancing is autonomy. You can organize your schedules, your working methods and your priorities according to your needs, which allows you to better reconcile professional and personal life. This freedom comes with the diversity of missions: you can work on varied projects and touch on different sectors, which enriches your skills and experience.
Freelancing also offers higher income potential than a traditional salaried position, provided you set consistent rates and maximize missions. Finally, this activity allows total independence: you make your professional decisions without hierarchy, with the possibility of completely managing your career.
The downsides of freelance life
Freelancing has certain constraints. Income can be irregular, especially at first, and isolation can affect motivation and network. Administrative management takes time, and personal discipline is essential to remaining productive. In short, being successful as a freelancer requires a balance between freedom and organization.
Salary portage: being a freelancer with employee status
The alternative to reconciling the freedom of being freelance and the security of employment is to opt for salary portage.
THE how salary portability works allows you to have an employment contract with an umbrella company. You benefit from all the advantages of being an employee: a pay slip, unemployment and retirement contributions, social benefits (restaurant vouchers for example), etc.
To find out more about salary portability, ITG Or ABC Portage are part of best umbrella companies in France.
The counterpart of salary portage is the cost of the contributions that you must pay to the portage organization. To get an idea of your salary based on your freelance income, you can carry out an online simulation.
If you have not yet launched your activity, this can give you an idea of the objective you should set if you wish to have complete social security coverage thanks to wage portage.
Conciliations
But freelance doesn't mean working alone! This can indeed happen on certain projects, but there are also projects where you can work with several people, projects where you have to work with client teams, etc.
Then, the fear of not knowing how to carry out a task, of reaching the end of your freelance skills or quite simply of not finding a solution yourself in the moment… Wouldn't it be too simple if you knew how to do everything and easily answer all of your clients' questions? Or even to never be faced with doing something you've never done before?
Finally, administration is indeed a part that you cannot do without as a freelancer and which seems very complex. Transform your quarterly VAT into half-yearly VAT! Today, the administration carries out all the calculations for you and your accountant is there to take care of all this, take advantage of this and rely on their knowledge. The freelancer has less administration to manage than the entrepreneur of a structure of 10 or more employees.
To become a freelancer, you have to get started
IF you really want to become a freelancer, the most important thing is to get started. Find your first mission, don't wait to start.
The signature of a first client will force you to take steps for your statutes. Once the machine starts, you will see that everything else will follow.
Find projects and send your quotes by registering and purchasing a subscription now at Codeur.com ! Hundreds of clients are looking for web freelancers for their projects every day!