Consulting rates have nothing to do with annual salaries unless you're strictly doing commoditized staff augmentation type of work. From what I've experienced,

Consulting rates have nothing to do with annual salaries unless you're strictly doing commoditized staff augmentation type of work. From what I've experienced, the difference in rates is more dependent on soft skills and positioning than tech chops. There are exceptions (FAANG engineers, popular open source authors), but generally it's folks with sales and marketing skills coupled with coding capabilities that rake it in. When you charge a straight up hourly rate it's very difficult to get lawyer rates ($200+ p/h). If you do project or retainer pricing, your effective hourly rate can be quite high if you're experienced and efficient. The other thing is company type, and whether you're close to revenue-generating activities. Large companies will shell out for tools that help with sales, lead gen, marketing automation, etc. Much more so than saving them money behind the scenes with HR systems or whatever. I've been consulting a long time and have learned a lot of this the hard way. :)