Are you hourly? Do you get vacation? Do you get medical, 401k? I have done both, and I typically factor it all in for pay. If you're hourly that means that

Are you hourly? Do you get vacation? Do you get medical, 401k? I have done both, and I typically factor it all in for pay. If you're hourly that means that you get paid for what you work, which is great if you've ever worked a salaried job and put in 50 hours a week. But it also means that you won't get vacation (most likely) so you either have to make up for that or factor in the amount of days you don't want to work into your schedule. So if you want to take 3 weeks off a year, factor that into your pay and reduce it accordingly. If you get paid overtime, then factor that in as well. This all sounds like a lot but my rule of thumb is as a contractor I should be making at least 20% more than as a FTE. This isn't the case based on my last job of 50+ hr weeks. That isn't even to start into how you approach the team and your code. As a Individual Contributing contractor (non-contract to hire), you probably won't be doing maintenance, setting schedule, or a lot of other project planning like activities. You'll be laying tracks down how they want. That isn't to say you can't make suggestions, and make the code more maintainable but that's not your primary focus once you're on site, it's to fit in to the team and support them. To make them better where they'll accept advice and to follow coding standards where they won't. While this is also true of FTE in a lot of cases, you aren't going to be maintaining this beast so if you bring it up (typically a few times) and they shoot you down then you did your best. Don't go rogue, if you see a better way to do something and you want to show them, it's OK to work up a POC but I typically don't charge for that if they don't take it. This is ALL my opinion, I've seen so many different types of contractors, some don't care, some go rogue and do whatever. The whole point is that at the end of the day you have a set time on the project and you have to keep that in mind. EDIT: I use pomodoros to justify to myself the hours I'm billing. This is a personal technique I really like, but it helps me identify when I'm going over and under what I should be doing in a day and to have a justification to myself (meetings or other such things).