Net Income Explorer
What Asian Freelancers Really Keep After Platform Fees & Tax
Every page in this explorer pairs one of six Asian countries with one of the big freelance marketplaces — Upwork, Fiverr, or Freelancer.com — and computes real take-home numbers using the country's actual tax brackets and deductions. The fees and figures update whenever the tax engine updates, and each combination has its own walkthrough: what the platform takes, how the country's tax rules treat that fee, what withdrawal costs do to the rest, and how the same invoice would look if a direct client paid it instead.
A US$100,000 career, country by country
Suppose a freelancer grosses roughly US$100,000 a year from platform work (converted at approximate mid-2025 exchange rates to each local currency, then run through each country's resident tax rules). This is what one local-currency figure buys after income tax — before the platform fee, which depends on which marketplace you are on:
| Country | $100k ≈ local | Tax | Net after tax | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 🇵🇭 Philippines | ₱5,800,000 | ₱444,000 | ₱5,356,000 | 7.7% |
| 🇮🇩 Indonesia | Rp1,600,000,000 | Rp407,800,000 | Rp1,192,200,000 | 25.5% |
| 🇲🇾 Malaysia | RM470,000 | RM100,260 | RM369,740 | 21.3% |
| 🇹🇭 Thailand | ฿3,500,000 | ฿767,000 | ฿2,733,000 | 21.9% |
| 🇻🇳 Vietnam | ₫2,550,000,000 | ₫728,100,000 | ₫1,821,900,000 | 28.6% |
| 🇮🇳 India | ₹8,300,000 | ₹858,000 | ₹7,442,000 | 10.3% |
Exchange rates are approximate (PHP 58, IDR 16,000, MYR 4.7, THB 35, VND 25,500, INR 83 per US$1). A 10% or 20% platform fee changes every row above, which is exactly what the per-platform pages detail.
Country × platform combos
🇵🇭 Philippines (PHP)
🇮🇩 Indonesia (IDR)
🇲🇾 Malaysia (MYR)
🇹🇭 Thailand (THB)
🇻🇳 Vietnam (VND)
How the numbers are built
Each combo page starts with a gross invoice, subtracts the marketplace fee to get the amount actually received, then runs that received sum through the relevant country's real tax calculator — Philippines 8% flat vs graduated rates, Indonesia's three methods, Malaysia's Form B reliefs, Thailand's 50% deduction, Vietnam's 2025 brackets, and India's 44ADA — and finally adds the withdrawal and currency-conversion costs that are easy to forget. The direct-client row on every page is the benchmark: it shows the same gross amount paid without a platform, so you can see in hard numbers what the marketplace truly costs you.
Calculate your own exact situation with the