In order to make 200K as a $100/hr contractor, you need to be continually employed at that rate. The consistent employment is the hard part. In my experience o

In order to make 200K as a $100/hr contractor, you need to be continually employed at that rate. The consistent employment is the hard part. In my experience one can make $100/hr+ as an iPhone contractor, but only in small chunks. It's getting harder, too, because there are now plenty of good-enough people who will charge less. Python + Javascript is hard, because there are loads of good people who will work full time for far less. One rule of thumb I've found for maximizing contract rates, is that the best paying jobs are usually with huge rich non-technical companies that are kind of internally screwed up and are trying to solve their software problems by throwing money at them. Thus, the best bet for making $200K as a contractor is to do something kind of horrible, like being a consultant at a bank or oil company fixing up a botched Oracle Financials install, or something like that. The other option, if you have a clearance, is doing defense contracting. (However, typically if you have the right clearance, you'd know about that option already.)