I know through how my former contracting employers have hired me out at vastly different rates that almost everything is up to three things in the end: 1. Your

I know through how my former contracting employers have hired me out at vastly different rates that almost everything is up to three things in the end: 1. Your target customers' pocketbook 2. Their belief that you can solve their problems 3. The business value those problems have It does you no good to try to find mom and pop shops that need a small brochure website for their little restaurant with a budget of about $100 for the website... unless you find several of them at a time and can build up a lot of work that way. Customers will pay more if their budget simply allows for it. I've priced myself out of even enterprise contracts / FTE jobs at rates that most people in the Bay Area would balk at, and those are generally pretty bad contracts to be on. For example, I know of a enterprise companies budgeted such that they can't even afford to pay $75 / hr for someone with a highly sought after skillset in a critical leadership role but are willing to shell out $500k+ / yr to vendors for random software? Waste of time almost always if you want to grow with those kinds of penny pinchers. Most recruiters on LinkedIn I've seen in my subgraph are talking about really poor contracting rates for gigs that I know typically go to consulting companies at about $130+ / hr but these spammed contracts are for $40 / hr people that know VMware (with VCP!), OpenStack, Chef / Puppet, 2+ scripting languages, have actual experience in production environments, be the helpdesk for everything, and are willing to do on-call with this stuff. What kind of companies are these that think they can find someone like that? I did hear a recruiter near my desk once that he had a position for a TS/SCI cleared sysadmin job with RH certs and CISSP in the DC metro area for... $45k / yr in 2013. What the hell, I think janitors with TS/SCI get paid more than that and it's starting to skirt close to what background investigators get and they're among the lowest paid high-clearance individuals ever.