Speaking only for myself and my own personal experience, here’s my take: 1. Contractors are medium to long-term, and can usually be renewed indefinitely, over

Speaking only for myself and my own personal experience, here’s my take: 1. Contractors are medium to long-term, and can usually be renewed indefinitely, over a period of years or decades. When I worked as a civilian employee in DoD, there were plenty of contractors who had worked on certain projects for many years, and they frequently provided the long-term stability for the project as the military and civilian employees changed more rapidly. They might be employed by one company this year and a different company the next, but they were the same people doing the same work, only this year it might be for CSC (or a subcontractor) and next year SAIC might win the contract — and turn around and employ the very same people through a different subcontracting company. Contracting is almost always technical in nature, although you could be a contractor project manager. 2. A consultant is there for a short period of time. They are in, work for a few hours or maybe a few days, and then they are gone. They don’t typically come back. You can have consultants who are self-employed, or they might be employees of a consulting company, but to the customer it doesn’t really matter much. Consulting can be technical in nature, or business oriented. Many consulting companies are smaller than contractor companies, but there are always exceptions. 3. A free-lancer is someone who might be working for multiple customers more or less at the same time, but they are only self-employed. They also typically get paid a flat fee for project work of potentially unspecified duration. Your wedding photographer is most likely a free-lancer. Much commercial art is done by free-lancers. I’ve worked for a consulting company, on two separate occasions — Collective Technologies back in the late 90s, and MomentumSI in the early twenty-teens. I’m now a contractor working for a large company headquarterd in Austin that was recently acquired by a much larger company from Seattle.