> Btw. as a freelancer you could end up paying less taxes, because more things are deductible.
But you're also paying a lot more in base taxes and lose out on a bunch of bottom line income. I've been a freelance worker for ~20 years and recently switched to a full time position to mix it up.
Your employer pays half of your social security taxes but as a contractor worker you need to pay both ends, that translates to about an extra 7% in taxes. On $235,000 income (let's say you wrote off a total of $15,000 in the year) that's an extra $16,450 in taxes.
Your employer usually matches 3-4% of your salary into a 401k which is yours without any vesting period. On a 250k salary that would be $7,500 at 3%.
Your employer usually pays your health insurance. The absolute bottom of the barrel worst insurance you can get will cost you around $450 / month if you're a contract worker or $5,400 a year. There were even years (2016-2017 I think) where if you didn't purchase your own insurance you ended up paying thousands of dollars in fines.
Your employer may contribute to a number of nice to haves like tax free stipends for internet / phone bills as a remote worker. Let's call that $1,500 a year for everything combined (some of which is direct money in your pocket and some are services you might have access to).
So in the end being self employed results in paying an extra $16,450 in taxes and you net lose $14,400. That's a total of about 30k less. You also have the extra burden of filing quarterly taxes or you pay fines. You'll likely end up having to pay for an accountant too which will be another $500+ / year (not included in the above totals).
Yes, as a freelancer you can deduct a portion of your home office as business rent, computer supplies and other things you need to do your job but for a remote worker there's really not as many deductions as you may think.
I'm not saying doing contract work or being self employed is bad but I think it's important to be aware of these extra costs and things to think about.
There are some tax perks of being self employed too, like being able to fund a SEP account. For most self employed folks you can put 20% of your income or up to 58k in 2021 into this account. It's somewhat comparable to a 401k in the sense that it's a tax deferred account, AKA any amount you put into there will be taken off your income taxes today and you will pay taxes when you start withdrawing the money at about 60 years old based on whatever your income is then.
So in our example above if you had 250k income, wrote off 15k and then maxed out your 20% into a SEP for another 47k you'd really pay income tax on 188k. Keep in mind as a salary worker you'd have 19.5k into a 401k so it's mainly a benefit of about 27.5k of extra income that you're tax deferring.
Note: I'm not an accountant and I might be calculating things incorrectly but it's in the ballpark of a few percent.