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Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

cole007.net

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Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#2
My gf works for a recruitment company in the Netherlands, and my general feeling looking at these results is that they're on the low side. Senior developers here charge in the region of 50-70 euros/hour, or about 450 euros/day. I'm fairly sure a senior with plenty of experience in an in-demand technology can push the 70 up into the 80-90 rate, and niche areas like SAP can be even higher.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#3
post #2

My gf works for a recruitment company in the Netherlands, and my general feeling looking at these results is that they're on the low side. Senior developers here charge in the region of 50-70 euros/hour, or about 450 euros/day. I'm fairly sure a senior with plenty of experience in an in-demand technology can push the 70 up into the 80-90 rate, and niche areas like SAP can be even higher.

It's not stated specifically in the article, but from the large number of respondents who offer act as both designer and developer, I suspect this survey is focused on web freelancers, as opposed to developers in general. I would expect to be able to charge far less for generic CMS-backed web site building than for more specialist areas.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#4
post #3
post #2

My gf works for a recruitment company in the Netherlands, and my general feeling looking at these results is that they're on the low side. Senior developers here charge in the region of 50-70 euros/hour, or about 450 euros/day. I'm fairly sure a senior with plenty of experience in an in-demand technology can push the 70 up into the 80-90 rate, and niche areas like SAP can be even higher.

It's not stated specifically in the article, but from the large number of respondents who offer act as both designer and developer, I suspect this survey is focused on web freelancers, as opposed to developers in general. I would expect to be able to charge far less for generic CMS-backed web site building than for more specialist areas.

Agree, I think there's a proportion of freelancers who do a mixture of boilerplate CMS development and backend development who have very different day rates for each just because the going rate for each is so different. It would be interesting to see the fraq.info web app expanded to include and use data from an ongoing survey which distinguishes between types of development.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#8

£300 per day. That's £37.50/hr before taxes. Peanuts if you are a consultant.

And you are a Software Developer and Technical Evangelist for IBM from Toronto, Canada.

I don't see how you added anything to the conversation.

Perhaps in your wisdom you could share what the difference is between a contractor and consultant and how to get these non 'peanut' jobs.

For example my old company provided consultants at £900 a day, probably still peanuts in your book, but these were employees who took a standard salary at less than £300 p/d and that money had to pay for salespeople, pre-contract technical support, offices, secretaries, etc. and all the effort on lost jobs as well as the actual work.

As a freelancer you don't have all those costs.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#9

£300 per day. That's £37.50/hr before taxes. Peanuts if you are a consultant.

In my experience it depends on the work. For consulting jobs where you go sit in a bank or whatever and bash out code onsite all day, £300 is low. But for freelance work, remote work, it's much harder to find anyone who will pay £300, let alone higher. It's not impossible but there's much more of a race to the bottom in the latter jobs than there is in the former.

Re: Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

#10

£300 per day. That's £37.50/hr before taxes. Peanuts if you are a consultant.

In my experience it depends on the work. For consulting jobs where you go sit in a bank or whatever and bash out code onsite all day, £300 is low. But for freelance work, remote work, it's much harder to find anyone who will pay £300, let alone higher. It's not impossible but there's much more of a race to the bottom in the latter jobs than there is in the former.

I disagree, the distinction between a contractor and consultant is not that one is on site and the other offsite. Many freelancers will work at the client's office if need be.

The terms have a massive grey area between them.

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