17 ms·

Poll: Contractors, what is your hourly rate

259 points by sixhobbits 4y ago

Poll version of [0] > I charge $115-130 an hour. All work is 100% remote. I customize Salesforce. > I think my rate is pretty good, but am wondering if I should charge more or if there is other tech I should specialize in that could get me a higher rate. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32606348

granshaw 4y ago
Faang still pays better… But below that contracting beats everything else, assuming you can get a fullish pipeline
ctocoder 4y ago
350 an hour
- PainfullyNormal 4y ago
  what's your area of expertise?
therusskiy 4y ago
I turned this poll into a chart: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IEfNjs_IoS3K3sG3W3Xh8XSiWqiRqcf9RdK8pCqKdzM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IEfNjs_IoS3K3sG3W3Xh...
samwillis 4y ago
I get that HN randomises the order of the options on polls to remove positional bias, but for a numeric poll with a natural order like this it results in horrible UX. (Apologies for the HN meta comment)
- sixhobbits 4y ago
  yeah I noticed that too :(
  - MichaelApproved 4y ago
    Edit 2: I didn’t realize I was replying to OP, so what I wrote below is not very relevant. I’ll leave it here so people can read it if they’re trying to avoid doing something else. Original comment below ——- As long as we’re doing HN meta comments, I’ll bring up that your “me too” reply is a pet peeve of mine. It would’ve been better to just upvote the parent comment and not reply with “me too”. A comment like that adds nothing to the conversation. Truly no offense is intended but the only time it’s additive is when the person saying it is notable to the conversation. Like OP, the article author, a moderator, etc. In those cases it’s only helpful if they clearly state who they are. Otherwise, it comes off as just another person asking for attention without contributing something. So, I downvoted your comment but wanted you to know why. Now, that I’ve said my peace, I must find something else to procrastinate with. Maybe I’ll continually refresh this page with the hope that I’ll get a reply and could procrastinate further by writing another long winded comment. Bonus points if they say something I think is blatantly wrong. Fingers crossed. Edit: Anytime I see a “me too” comment, I sing the line from Weird Al’s “all about the pentiums”. I won’t repeat the line because it’s offensive and that’s not how I feel but I sing it every time. I wonder if anyone else does this too.
    - samwillis 4y ago
      While I agree with you, I think the exception to the rule (and maybe a few others) is the OP of a post, in this case sixhobbets is the OP.
      - MichaelApproved 4y ago
        ::face palm:: Thanks for pointing that out. I will change my downvote to an upvote. Though I did mention that it’s acceptable for someone like OP but only when they explicitly say they’re OP. However, it would be silly for OP to keep mentioning they’re OP in every comment. Reddit is nice in the way they give OPs comment a slight treatment to make it clear they are OP.
        mynameismon 4y ago
- mkl95 4y ago
  This is a good argument for rewriting HN in Rust.
  - powerhour 4y ago
    While we're at it, can we build a blockchain to store the votes already? It's 2022!
    - VikingCoder 4y ago
      [Can't tell if serious.] Remember the Slashdot equivalent of blockchaining everything? "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!"
    - politelemon 4y ago
      Perhaps we could fund HN by issuing NFTs for each poll response.
      - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
        I'm disappointed that we haven't talked about a) using the GPU to accelerate the poll item sorting (EDIT: I was wrong! Someone did!) b) rewriting not just the backend in Rust, but the whole front-end in Rust, compiling to WebAssembly. (Drawing the whole thing into the canvas instead of using the icky DOM, too!) c) Machine learning wasn't mentioned once
        water-your-self 4y ago
        Re: c) who do you think writes these comments?
    - mkl95 4y ago
      Vanilla HN votes considered harmful
      - tomrod 4y ago
fbanks 4y ago
$145 - 300
weeksie 4y ago
It's a shame that you can't do a multi part poll. I'd love to know people's rates _and_ their years of experience, language, industry, etc.
- m0rissette 4y ago
  84.7/hr 15 years experience Polyglot, full stack, DevOps, and Linux Sysmin Industry: Tech Area: Hampton Roads, Virginia
  - weeksie 4y ago
    I bet you could raise your rate quite a bit. I'm 20y exp mostly typescript and front ends these days but very much a polyglot background and I run up and down the stack all the time. I charge $225, which tbh I feel is low for my level of expertise. I'm based in NYC but that shouldn't matter as much these days.
- TobTobXX 4y ago
  The Stackoverflow Survey gives a great insight i to these metrics: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/ https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/
  - tpxl 4y ago
    'Students' have 4.86 years of professional coding experience according to the survey, which is just weird. Given that, I wouldn't trust the data much.
    - tomjakubowski 4y ago
      Hey now, anyone can be a student for life.
    - culi 4y ago
      Many compsci students I know are now doing internships in their freshmen year. By the time their seniors they're often balancing school with some other sort of ongoing program I'm sure that number is inflated, but there's still some truth to it
hardwaresofton 4y ago
I think there’s successful business (essentially, niche glassdoor) for this. Someone please make it. For more explanation: https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io/editions/012 https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io/editions/012
- granshaw 4y ago
  A Blind-like site for contracting would be awesome too (Blind is a site where devs mainly discuss salaries)
  - hardwaresofton 4y ago
    That’s a GREAT idea. If someone doesn’t pick this idea up (please tell me if you do so I can at least save myself time!) I’ll put something out next week.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
devmor 4y ago
I don't actually have a flat rate, I charge anywhere between $65/hr to $250/hr depending on what I'm doing, where I'm doing it, who I'm working with and most importantly - how exhausting/annoying my client is.
- majkinetor 4y ago
  Exactly. Fixed rate is not a good idea. Not every job is the same. For instance, if you have to do intervention on highly critical system with risk of reputation loss on any error, you should charge more.
  - devmor 4y ago
    And on the same note, I often work with charities and educational orgs who I just don't feel like charging a high rate to, because I want to help with their work.
capableweb 4y ago
Without location (or "remote" specified), this is almost 100% useless. Someone who is top 1% developer in Sudan, working for Sudanese companies will earn way less than even a mediocre freelance developer in a highly developed country.
- zdragnar 4y ago
  That same Sudanese developer might be convinced to start working remotely if they saw how little they were paid in comparison (assuming national pride / valuing civil service isn't a strong factor).
- rutierut 4y ago
  I never really got this reasoning. How can you honestly be “best of the best” but be dumb enough to ignore remote work. Something you almost actively have to be doing these days and which, for this hypothetical person, has an insane payoff. This person is supposedly both super smart but at the same time can’t even see the fruit that’s so low-hanging that it’s literally smacking him in the face.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    "dumb enough"? Not everyone wants to work remotely. Some people prefer to work with other humans in a physical location. Doesn't make them smarter or dumber, just a preference.
  - CalRobert 4y ago
    Not sure. I'm not "best of the best" but I work remote because Americans pay twice as much as Europeans.
- bityard 4y ago
  Given that the currency is in USD, I assumed a US context was implied.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    I don't see why its presumed to be USD specifically. Could be any sort of Dollar, arguably. As far as I know, there are more than ten countries using some sort of "Dollar" which uses the same symbol ("$") for their currency. But yeah, probably safe to assume USD, just playing devils advocate I guess. Even so, on US-based platforms, like reddit or HN, USD is usually used as a "convertion unit" rather than a implication of location, I've found.
toxicFork 4y ago
Reading this post and the linked one, TIL I should charge way more.
- secos 4y ago
  Usually the case. Patio11 wrote about this forever ago: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-to-charge-more/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-...
- nicolas_t 4y ago
  And charging more also often has the side effect that you'll be taken more seriously. People are more likely to listen to you if you charge more because they'll place more value in your work.
- adrr 4y ago
  People always undercharge. Any software consulting agency will charge min $125/hr and most around $175/hr.
  - smugma 4y ago
    When I was in business school 15 years ago I interned for a Big 4 consultancy, paid $40/hr (hourly on an $80K assumed salary). Rather than do things by hand like many MBA’s, I wrote some scripts to make it easy to create lots of Excel files (can’t remember if I used a DB, I don’t think so). Client wanted to keep me on during the year, and my employer never had that come up and didn’t know what to do. So client offered me $100/hr and said I could use a different one-guy firm as my employer to avoid new vendor set up. They offered me $100/hr. Being an MBA student I figured I was being undervalued (even at 2.5X, as I was doing both engineering and MBA BS). My manager very firmly but nicely said $100 was an excellent rate. I agreed and did 10-15 hours a week, mostly training 2 employees at the consultancy how to do what I did and move away from my non-standard scripts. Sometimes you’re offered the right rate upfront!
mjh2539 4y ago
The plumber I called recently in the Austin metro area charges $150/hr.
- Workaccount2 4y ago
  I can't decide if the plumber should be charging more or less. It's hard to put a value on not having to go outside to an outhouse.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    I get the not having to part, but I wish it was acceptable to have one in our backyards. If it’s well built, they’ll be less odourful than a standard toilet/bathroom by drawing air away from where it’s the worst.
  - moistly 4y ago
    Are they dealing with blackwater or copper or pex? Because any fool can do pex and soldering honestly doesn’t take much skill, and no amount is too much for dealing with some stranger’s blackwater.
- sixhobbits 4y ago
  An electrician finishes up a wiring job for a lawyer and presents her with an invoice. The lawyer looks at it and says, "Wow, I don't even charge that much per hour and I'm a lawyer" The electrician says, "Tell me about it. I didn't charge that much when I was a lawyer either"
- desireco42 4y ago
  Similar in Chicago. Electricans as well
- Maximus9000 4y ago
  I assume your plumber isn't getting 8 hours per day though. A lot of time in wasted in commuting and paperwork (I assume).
  - 4y ago
kator 4y ago
I'm not currently billing for contract work, but when I was my formula was: rate = YearlyGoal / 1700 Which is to say, 2000 hours at 85% billable (leaving time for vacation). Some years I was 105% billable but those are brutal years and I'm sure my life will be shorter for it.
- kijin 4y ago
  You must have been pretty good at billing every single hour you spend on your clients. I was once told that it's unwise to expect to bill more than 50% of the time I spend, so I've been sticking close to $target_income / 1000 for the last few years. The actual ratio of billable to unbillable hours probably depends a lot on what kind of contracts you get and what type of work you do.
TobbenTM 4y ago
For my full-stack AWS/Node/.Net/React/Vue.js contracts I usually charge 90-150€ depending on clients. 7 years of professional experience.
cj 4y ago
You're going to get wildly different answers from people who 1) Contracting for the same company all the time (common with people outside the US contracting 40 hrs/week with a US company). These hourly rates will be much lower 2) Contracting for many different companies. These hourly rates are much higher because you need to budget for idle time, searching for your next contract, etc.
- ghaff 4y ago
  As contracting blends into consulting, you can easily get into a situation where your on-the-clock time is very valuable but you're not actually on-the-clock all that much. It doesn't mean you're not doing anything but you may be writing/speaking/researching/etc. for "free."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago
  Is $125/hr for 8 hours a day 5 days a week at a corporation (in lieu of salary) competitive?
  - pc86 4y ago
    What's the yearly rate? If you take 3 weeks/year of vacation (standard PTO for a full-time employee in the US), that's $245,000 cash comp. Excluding the SV/HN outliers, that is an extremely good salary for even a senior developer. Until very recently Amazon's cash comp was capped at $160k. Startups lean very heavily on perks and paper stock that is worth nothing 95% of the time. Wider industry (banks, mom/pop shops, design firms, etc) will top out at high 100k/low 200k and usually don't have bonuses more than 3-5% of salary and almost never offer stock.
    - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
      > that is an extremely good salary for even a senior developer. Is there any kind of "outlier" there with like... it's good for a senior developer but not a principal/architect level developer? I'm just curious why the poll on this post has people saying they are making $150-$300/hr... Are they "lying" and it isn't steady 40 hour a week pay?
debacle 4y ago
Varies greatly for me. Generally $120, but only because I give good clients a 20% discount, but I'll go down to $60 for work that I really want to do.
sgjohnson 4y ago
€50-€100
sixhobbits 4y ago
I can't edit it now, but of course it's ambiguous as to where the boundaries lie so please take the upper limits as EXCLUSIVE. e.g. if you charge exactly $100, rather pick $100-$150 and NOT $70-$100.
sixhobbits 4y ago
I think this chart [0] should automatically update with the data from here, but let's see if it works. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTcsaHx997ntDI4L8Glcjj1-NBJ07UpgvJOgncxDWwdRKNBFvF9xK2dYITZ2vlg6Ztdwst7jUEpoh4O/pubhtml?gid=950803344&single=true https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTcsaHx997nt...
- tuukkah 4y ago
  Thanks! Note that the x axis isn't fully in the correct order.
  - sixhobbits 4y ago
    thanks, fixed. Also Google seems to cache aggressively, so it doesn't update even if I edit a cell.
- algoatecorn 4y ago
  How does this work? Is it populating a spreadsheet with xml?
  - sixhobbits 4y ago
    Yes you can do importhtml in a spreadsheet and find the tables or lists so I just used that and then some hacks vlookups to put into a table with the correct ordering
brd529 4y ago
Salesforce is an interesting one - many eng leaders don’t consider it “engineering” because they aren’t that familiar with the platform (often the salesforce devs are grouped in the the salesforce admins in their minds, and organizationally the salesforce devs often sit under IT), so it’s a problem they don’t think about much. Then they are surprised when they find themselves desperately needing the skill set once the business has decided to do a big salesforce thing and not having anyone on hand who a) can do apex / knows salesforce or b) is willing to do it. So they often turn to salesforce speciality agencies and pay through the nose. To answer your question - I’ve seen salesforce agencies bill their developers and designers at a blended rate of $170-$200 for $1M+ projects for onshore (US) talent. I suspect if you are a decent software engineer who knows salesforce well you can probably find clients willing to pay higher rates.
- lupire 4y ago
  What is Salesforce dev? Is it webapps, but using Salesforce framework instead of RoR or Django?
  - te_chris 4y ago
    CTO here, but I built the first bits of our SF setup. It’s essentially a fully cloud hosted rapid development environment that gives you a database and ways to visualise and do crud on this. For line of business stuff this can be really powerful. As a dev, it’s mostly around gluing the bits between and around the key crud actions and doing meta presentation and interface stuff.
  - mym1990 4y ago
    Salesforce dev has evolved heavily in the last 10 years. Nowadays, depending on the project, you can be working on integrations most of the time, complex automations, and/or front end development through the Lightning Web Components framework. Last project I did a fair amount of work integrating Salesforce with AWS, using Lambda to talk to other services. It was pretty fun!
  - debaserab2 4y ago
    It's usually a soupy mix of salesforce API integration work and wading through tons and tons of programmery-looking user interfaces. It's not hard, but it requires an incredible amount of overhead to first understand various different salesforce specific concepts and then understand the various different broken workflows your company has adopted using those concepts.
phkahler 4y ago
This is important information even for non-contractors. I was interviewing for a position several years ago. They had zero software people at the time (the last guy quit) and one of the hardware engineers in frustration told me they were contracting some company (2 guys in barn) for like $50k a month. Since I would be replacing them I aimed high, but still well below them. Company didn't even question my salary. If I'm not mistaken they gave me "manager" title simply to put my pay in the right bracket, but that also meant my bonus was higher than most the other engineers. Know what a company is willing to pay for work, contract or not.
- snowwrestler 4y ago
  I will just say that it’s never 1:1 because contractors come with way less benefit and legal baggage than employees. I’ve had a CFO tell me he’s willing to pay 2x-3x salary to get the same work from contractors.
  - adrian_b 4y ago
    Also any contractor has to request 2x-3x more than when receiving a salary, to cover for extra expenses and taxes and for extra risks (time when no contract is obtained).
  - phkahler 4y ago
    >> I’ve had a CFO tell me he’s willing to pay 2x-3x salary I took that into account. I made between 100k and 200k per year vs the other guys 600k for the same work, which I arguably did better since it was my specialty. The company really was being taken for a ride by the contractors (if what I was told was true).
    - joshspankit 4y ago
      Companies being taken for a ride by contractors: 100% happens. I’ve seen it first hand from the head offices. In both cases it was “we’re going with product X because it’s supposed to be the best. Does anyone here have expertise in it? No? Good thing the vendor has trusted partners.” One contracting company had the audacity to fly in two carloads of “experts” before the system was even set up. They lingered and deflected even the most basic questions about the product.
slowmotiony 4y ago
These $300+ guys must be COBOL programmers
- Nextgrid 4y ago
  The reason there's a COBOL developer shortage and every shitty company is crying is because they're not actually paying very well. If they were willing to pay that much there would be no problems finding COBOL people.
  - anm89 4y ago
    Yeah I had this misconception as well. These guys are very poorly paid a lot of the time.
nicolas_t 4y ago
Started at $40/hour, met someone who told me I was hugely undercharging for my services and devaluing my work, so increased to $100/hour (which improved my relationship with my clients and had the nice side effect of being taken seriously), then $125, $150 and eventually had a couple of clients I wasn't that keen on that I decided to charge $300 per hour to see if they'd balk or not. They didn't. It does mean that now the majority of my work is the work for those exhausting clients that pay very well. Not great for my work/life balance, great for my bank account.
- wpietri 4y ago
  Yes, yes, yes. So many technical people vastly undercharge. My firm experience is that the more you charge, the better people listen.
- granshaw 4y ago
  What kind of work if you don’t mind me asking? And do you get embedded in a team like their other engineers or solo?
- orblivion 4y ago
  Do you increase to $100 with the leverage of new clients willing to pay that much, or do you just say "yeah I'm $100 now"?
  - ianmcgowan 4y ago
    It would be poor form to change rates mid-project, and difficult to do if there's a formal agreement or statement of work involved. As I get to the end of a project I start looking around for something new, if there's more than one option I use rate to help decide which one to do. If one project (A) is more interesting or I like the customer better, they get the current rate $x quoted, but the other (B) gets $x+25. With an offer from B in hand, it's easier to ask A to match, and almost always they do. Same with salary negotiations - much easier to negotiate from a position with options.
    - 4y ago
arcticbull 4y ago
A good rule of thumb is to take your annual salary and divide by 1000. That's your hourly rate. If you make $100K, charge $100/hr - which if fully booked is like $200K if you did it full time. That accounts for your overhead, your pipeline not always being full, etc.
- gk1 4y ago
  The overhead on an employee is more like 20–30%, not 100%. Separately, the value of a contractor is different than the value of an employee, so why should the prices be equivalent (even taking overhead into account). As a contractor, you're not only help the client with a project but you're also saving them the time, effort, and risk of bringing someone in full-time... Why not charge for that?
  - arcticbull 4y ago
    > The overhead on an employee is more like 20–30%, not 100%. That's a separate question, and personally I prefer double as a rule of thumb (I've read some studies to support that number) - but 20% is outright wrong. You'd pay 20% for office space rent alone. Employer portion of payroll taxes are 7.65% and health insurance in the group markets is $600/mth. Then add in legal, hardware, software, servers, HR tools, accountants - it adds up fast. However my point was that it accounts not just for your overhead (remember you have significantly worse economy of scale at 1) but also, and this is critical, your pipeline not always being full. As a contractor you won't always have a job, and you should account for that in your estimation. > As a contractor, you're not only help the client with a project but you're also saving them the time, effort, and risk of bringing someone in full-time... Why not charge for that? You are, about double. Like I said, $100K/yr -> $100/hr is $208K/yr. This isn't a perfect system, but it's a good rule of thumb. [1] https://www.iofficecorp.com/blog/space-management-empty-desk https://www.iofficecorp.com/blog/space-management-empty-desk
stuff4ben 4y ago
For those in the US, how much do you all pay for "benefits"? Healthcare, etc...
- vdqtp3 4y ago
  An FTE will pay anywhere from $200-$1000/mo for single person healthcare (subsidized by the employer. A contractor will pay closer to $1000-2000/mo for similar coverage. Retirement is pretty shit even when company matched, so the numbers are mostly even between contractor and FTE.
- bluedino 4y ago
  The easy solution to this is have a spouse that has a fulltime job and has benefits.
clusterhacks 4y ago
I did side consulting at $70 for someone getting a business off the ground. After the company was more up and running, I switched to a flat $1,000 per day to avoid being asked to do too many "small" tasks.
ascendantlogic 4y ago
who are these poor souls in the "Under $20" and "$20-$40" range?
- artogahr 4y ago
  Me, used to do full-time-style remote contract work for a company in Europe, and my hourly rate was $10/h. Granted it was still good money compared to where I live, but there you go. Now moved to and working in Europe as a TAC engineer for $18.5/h.
- vbezhenar 4y ago
  I live in KZ, I'm not sure if I'm qualified as a contractor as I mostly work for the same company, but technically I'm contractor. My current rate is around $15. I'm making like 3x of everyone around me, so not really poor.
  - seabrookmx 4y ago
    > so not really poor I think this highlights an issue with this poll: the potentially huge disparity in cost of living. Where I live (Western Canada) this is below our minimum wage mandated by law. But renting a single bedroom apartment is also nearing $2000/month.
    - vbezhenar 4y ago
      I own single bedroom apartments and my monthly payment is $20 for electricity, water, etc and $10 for Internet. Plus $10 at winter for heating. Renting single bedroom apartment must be something around $500 here for good apartments and down to $200 if you're not very picky (we don't really use concept of bedroom, we use total number of rooms excluding kitchen, and one-room apartments probably are most popular for renting).
- wingerlang 4y ago
  I did some freelance work for $30 which is matching my current salary, which is actually very high over here (Thailand, iOS developer). I never went all in on freelancing, so it's hard to push for high salaries. Most 'remote' I've found is just within-america-remotely or Europe, etc, as well.
danielvaughn 4y ago
I tailor my price quite a bit based on what I want. At my best, I feel I'm worth about $200/hour. But I like to work with very early stage companies, and they rarely can afford that. Plus, I've entered into a stage of my life where I just find it hard to really push myself. I like having a relaxing job that I don't need to think too hard about, i.e. I don't really feel like being worth $200/hour. So these days I've been varying between $50-75/hour.
- lupire 4y ago
  Don't think about how hard you work. Think about how much longer the young inexperienced person would have to work hard to match your results. Think about how much time you dnt spend on mistakes on the way to completion, and bake that multiplier into your rate.
  - jdjslskshdj 4y ago
    This resonated with me, thank you for writing this.
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    Very true, that's a great way to think about it.
- pc86 4y ago
  Honestly I get this. I was charging $175-200/hr for years, 2-5 hours/week on top of my full-time dev job. Now I've taken easier gigs for $90/hr, and do ~10 hours/week on top of my EM job and it feels 10x better.
up_and_up 4y ago
I stopped charging hourly, now just monthly retainer. Making around $800 per hour, depending on the month.
- wallawe 4y ago
  can you elaborate a little more and explain the mechanics of this setup?
  - up_and_up 4y ago
    This is for a part-time gig. I charge a set amount per month up to a max number of hours worked. If I work 1 hour or 10 it doesnt matter. Usually I only work 2.5 hours a month hence the high hourly rate.
  - MisterBastahrd 4y ago
    I also charge on retainer. I set a dollar amount that makes messing with their stuff worth my time, and then they get to tell me what I'm supposed to do for them that month for those hours. If they don't talk to me, I still get paid. If they go over, then I get an extra hourly rate.
    - jrib 4y ago
      how many hours per month are usually retained?
- efa 4y ago
  1.6 mil a year. That's not too shabby.
- PainfullyNormal 4y ago
  Is that mostly in DevOps?
  - up_and_up 4y ago
    Mostly Rails development
reachableceo 4y ago
120.00 per hour plus expenses . Payable at time of delivery.
dustingetz 4y ago
dominant factor here is how rich your customer is
marpstar 4y ago
I only moonlight, but my rates are dependent on non-profit status, locality, and size of the company. The rate I charge Fortune 500 companies ($150/hr) is about twice that I charge the local library ($80/hr).
- lupire 4y ago
  Non-profit just means money goes to employees and managers, not investors. Focus more on the social value of the work the business does, and how fairly emooyees are paid, not legal tax status.
- sriram_sun 4y ago
  If you're moonlighting Fortune 500 companies will rarely talk to you directly. So my guess is that you are contracting with a company that is either directly contracting with the Fortune 500 company or is itself a subcontractor. The $150 per hour that makes its way to you is probably seeing a few levels of attrition :-)!
  - HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
    I moonlight behind an LLC for exactly this reason. I got an F500 client a long time ago and I was nervous that they'd figure out that my Sole Proprietorship was just me (don't even remember why I thought that), so one night I went to the Secretary of State website and registered an LLC and once that was done, got a tax EIN from the IRS. Completely unnecessary at the time, it turned out, but over the years I've found that a lot of people are more comfortable working with Joe Blow LLC than just Joe Blow.
ukoki 4y ago
For the Europeans feeling US numbers are unattainable: I'm on £1100/day in London with about 8 years devops/cloud/IaaS experience
- hankchinaski 4y ago
  Is that inside or outside ir35? This is CTO-Head Of level pay for a contractor in london. Unless you work in a hedge-fund, in which case that is attainable even as a IC
  - ukoki 4y ago
    Inside sadly, but my previous contract was 950 outside.
- DoingIsLearning 4y ago
  I have been in consulting for several years and then back to permanent positions. What advice do you have for people who are happy to do technical work but find too stressful (in terms of 'people skills') to manage clients and the networking side of sourcing clients?
  - lupire 4y ago
    Find someone to pimp you out for 25-50%.
    - pc86 4y ago
      Standard rate is 30% for placement of permanent positions (e.g. recruiters) and 10% for contract.
      - Silhouette 4y ago
        30% for how long though? 10% seems low for a UK recruitment agency placing contractors in software dev or similar fields unless we're talking about relatively long engagements and the recruiter fees continue throughout.
wiremine 4y ago
This is useful, but it is HIGHLY dependent on the services being offered. $300 for some work can be a steal, and $40 can be overpriced.
moralestapia 4y ago
Talk about synchronicity, I was just researching this for a gig I got involved with. Just to be clear, contractor means you get no other benefit but the money they give you per hour worked. And this rate is not inclusive of expenses, taxes, etc...
paulschreiber 4y ago
Amounts should be $20-39, $40-69, $70-99 to avoid overlap.
Beltiras 4y ago
I used to take 125$/hour but haven't felt the need to take on clients for a while (dayjob is plenty for me). If I were to joint the hustle again, it wouldn't be at less than 250.
jimmydean1765 4y ago
In 2005 I was doing PLC programming and didn’t even have my degree finished yet. I always quoted $100 per hour and was never turned down. Being that it’s 17 years later and I’d assume most of you have some sort of formal certification then I’d say you’re undervaluing yourself. Is it still typical to register a business as a contractor and invoice for your hours as an independent? If so you need to add at least 35% just for business overhead. IMH0
- jimmydean1765 4y ago
  To clarify. I don’t only mean your own business overhead, as I assume you can operate a basic contracting business for less than 35% of annual earnings. What I mean is that employees cost businesses around a 35% premium for benefits, employee side payroll taxes, liabilities, etc. In actual fact if all my employees were happy to take a 35% pay increase to become contractors I’d bet it’s a good deal for the corporation.
- bluedino 4y ago
  There's probably not a million PLC programmers on Upwork/Fiver/whatever
kareemm 4y ago
I've moved my effective hourly rate from $250/h to up to $1k/h by billing on a project basis. I did this after I ran across Jonathan Stark's book Hourly Billing is Nuts[1] and implemented a lot of his advice. The two best things I've done to increase my effective hourly rate and my topline revenue in my solo consulting practice have been 1) taking his advice to ditch hourly billing and 2) niching down to focus on Trial to Paid conversion[2]. 1 - https://jonathanstark.com/hbin https://jonathanstark.com/hbin 2 - http://www.trialtopaid.com http://www.trialtopaid.com
- crpietschmann 4y ago
  Interesting you say you use http://www.trialtopaid.com http://www.trialtopaid.com to make money when that site is down...
  - kareemm 4y ago
    https://www.trialtopaid.com https://www.trialtopaid.com (https) doesn't work right now but http://www.trialtopaid.com http://www.trialtopaid.com (http) redirects to my consulting site https://www.reemer.com https://www.reemer.com. If you're using an extension that only does https you won't get redirected. Haven't bothered setting TTP.com up properly yet. Shoeless cobbler's kids, etc.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - goldenkey 4y ago
      +1 doctor who smokes.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  How do you bill on a project basis? Half the people say that billing anything other than hourly is nuts, and the other group says anything other than fixed price is nuts.
  - 4y ago
tgtweak 4y ago
I don't even do hourly billing any more - after seeing how miserable many of my friends in the legal world were despite their high salaries and billable rates. If you can't capture a percentage of the value you're generating, you're not properly focused on generating value. This is what really turned around my ARR on advising. Not true for all levels of advising/consulting, but at the executive/founder level this was the big change.
archi42 4y ago
It's also important to consider the type of company and the type of work done: A single person or small team doing contracting work will have a different (likely smaller) overhead than larger companies. OTOH having more people allows for a wider array of capabilities, or being able to tackle larger projects, or develop internal tools for higher efficiency.
bmitc 4y ago
I am curious. Do all contractors do hourly billing or do some work on weekly or monthly rates or just per project rates? Hourly billing seems hard for contracting.
- gk1 4y ago
  If you want to earn more for the value you provide, monthly retainers or project fees are the way to go.
majestic5762 4y ago
I raised $2M by developing a full e2e white-labeled crypto crowdfunding solution as an entrepreneur(as a solo dev anyway), but I make 50$/h as a solo dev for any other side gig. And I took care of everything, from legal, accounting, infra, dev team, marketing, and business. Guess I'm undervalued as an individual and not as a corporation? Take away: incorporate yourself
m1117 4y ago
[Delete maybe] I'd also like a poll on how much taxes the contractors pay
ArtemZ 4y ago
36$/hour as a Senior DevOps Engineer
kretaceous 4y ago
I will piggyback on the thread to ask something that I've been thinking about contracting/freelancing. Is contracting an ideal job for people who don't work well in teams? By "don't work well", I don't necessarily mean rude or intolerable people. I mean more like, doing all the work on your own, going out of your way to work on something, working without being told, etc. Also, how to start your career as a developer on contract?
- pc86 4y ago
  You need contacts/referrals to start. If you don't have those, you're going to end up getting very low-paid shit work for shit people. Nearly half of my contracts have been former employers, or companies where a former manager/coworker was and got me an interview. The rest have been referrals from those companies. Cold outreach or inbound is a small minority (<10% for sure).
  - ciekawy 4y ago
    as for how to start there are also contracting companies like eg Toptal with decent amount of projects from variety of companies from startups to enterprises and you're setting your own rate - probably not above the median but still good enough to start.
- olau 4y ago
  Well, could be. You do need to be self-driven, and also be able to see the bigger picture so you actually help your clients. I think some distance is helpful, too. Some clients can be really dysfunctional in the sense that they will spend all day talking about things in meetings, and never do anything about it, probably because they're not comfortable bringing about the changes. That's why they hired you. You're the change agent. But communication is important. There's no boss to set the expectations or clear up misunderstandings for you, you need to do that yourself, carefully. If you think you'll find it difficult to bother explaining things to people, then you probably need to contract on something where you can communicate through a version control system.
- ciekawy 4y ago
therusskiy 4y ago
I remember when I was starting out (~2 years of professional experience at the time) I was contracting as a ROR fullstack developer for a San Francisco startup for $17/h. Local salary in Russia as Java developer before that was around $2.6/h. So that I felt pretty rich doing that. I remember I used to only bill for like 70% of hours I worked because I felt bad if there was some task that I couldn't implement right away or a bug I had to figure out. These days my rate is about $60/h working for a US company with 9 years of experience.
haspok 4y ago
Which continent, which country, which region, which city? Without this information this poll is meaningless.
5350-uiop-1130 4y ago
big difference between a $300 p/h client a $20 p/h client. guessing the former is from prior connections, employers, word of mouth and the latter from contracting services.
brk 4y ago
$500/hr, on average.
nathias 4y ago
$35 senior front-end / medior backend, EU costs of living about 2k for essentials
vasergen 4y ago
A bit of off-topic, but do you as a contractors have time for personal growth. What I mean, is it possible you will be reading a book on some topics or taking webinar / course whatever and being paid for that?
- siwatanejo 4y ago
  Why not? Just don't work 40h a week and then you have time.
clavalle 4y ago
Depends on the length of the contract. Super short term contracts (measured in hours): $250/hr (though I might raise this after looking at this thread!) Short term contracts: $200/hr Longer term contracts: $175/hr Retainer: $125 a month I'm not a full-time contractor, though, so these rates are designed so that people and organizations that really need my help (and I generally have some previous relationship with) can get it if they really need it without wasting my time on unimportant projects. I'm a generalist I design and build software and run teams that do the same (super descriptive, huh?)
jdjslskshdj 4y ago
I've been doing web dev (react) contracting for 8 months now. First months was 50 and 60/hr, then big, main contract at 100, now 160 as a part time. Quite the learning experience, and goes to show how far confidence will take you.
philip1209 4y ago
Another question for freelancers: What's your ratio of deep work to shallow work? With coding, intensity impacts how long you can work. In the book Deep Work, Cal Newport says that ~4 hours per day of high-intensity focus is about the limit. So, how many hours do you bill per day on average - and of those hours, what's the breakdown of high-intensity vs. other work?
iDoMagento 4y ago
72€/h (+20% VAT on the invoice). 7+ years of Magento development experience for the local SMB market, Estonia. Just for reference, Magento is a huge monolithic e-commerce platform (PHP + jQuery + knockoutjs + xml - hello 2012!) that doesn't seem to be very popular amongst the HN crowd. I do it all from the frontend to integrations with ERPs, client tutorials/ handholding, hosting/devops etc etc. 0 marketing, all clients through word of mouth basically. Most follow a similar pattern: larger agency develops some almost working solution over a few years, developers leave and take in-house project specific knowledge with them, client left hanging and agency bills huge amounts for no progress and the relationship sours. Most end up being long-term clients since the market for Magento devs is horrific, e-commerce never sleeps and the tech keeps on churning. Who wants to do primarily legacy maintenance work, right? To my surprise, it's actually very rewarding because of the close contact with the primary stakeholders. I manage around 20 billable hours a week, all remote since the beginning. I say manage because having a 2year old run around takes the other 20 to 80. I have way too much work piled up already and yet here I am writing this comment for some reason...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
lumoe 4y ago
I currently charge 65€/hour, which is incredibly low considering that beside doing the fullstack development for their rather complex product. I also do their product development, working with UI/UX designers, doing the devops AND I do first to third level support (basically for free). Still, I was unable to explain this to the customer, who still sees me as the guy who does some programming. For future companies, I want to move to project based billing (as already mentioned in previous comments) and stop underselling my work. Any recommendation on how I can train pitching myself or good readings are very welcome.
anm89 4y ago
$90 but it is guaranteed 40+ hr / week and has been consistent over years
acquacow 4y ago
I do federal contracting for a parent company and I get billed out around $320-350/hr as far as I can tell. I, of course, only see a fraction of that though =P
throwAway42jlk8 4y ago
$90 per hour remotely for a US company. As a Django developer from the UK this rate is really good for me, plus it is outside IR35. I doubt I'd be able to get this at a UK company.
Leftium 4y ago
Visual graph of poll results: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/32606904 https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/32606904

259 points by sixhobbits 4y ago

granshaw 4y ago

Faang still pays better… But below that contracting beats everything else, assuming you can get a fullish pipeline

ctocoder 4y ago

350 an hour

PainfullyNormal 4y ago
what's your area of expertise?

therusskiy 4y ago

I turned this poll into a chart: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IEfNjs_IoS3K3sG3W3Xh8XSiWqiRqcf9RdK8pCqKdzM/edit?usp=sharing https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IEfNjs_IoS3K3sG3W3Xh...

samwillis 4y ago

I get that HN randomises the order of the options on polls to remove positional bias, but for a numeric poll with a natural order like this it results in horrible UX. (Apologies for the HN meta comment)

sixhobbits 4y ago
yeah I noticed that too :(
- MichaelApproved 4y ago
  Edit 2: I didn’t realize I was replying to OP, so what I wrote below is not very relevant. I’ll leave it here so people can read it if they’re trying to avoid doing something else. Original comment below ——- As long as we’re doing HN meta comments, I’ll bring up that your “me too” reply is a pet peeve of mine. It would’ve been better to just upvote the parent comment and not reply with “me too”. A comment like that adds nothing to the conversation. Truly no offense is intended but the only time it’s additive is when the person saying it is notable to the conversation. Like OP, the article author, a moderator, etc. In those cases it’s only helpful if they clearly state who they are. Otherwise, it comes off as just another person asking for attention without contributing something. So, I downvoted your comment but wanted you to know why. Now, that I’ve said my peace, I must find something else to procrastinate with. Maybe I’ll continually refresh this page with the hope that I’ll get a reply and could procrastinate further by writing another long winded comment. Bonus points if they say something I think is blatantly wrong. Fingers crossed. Edit: Anytime I see a “me too” comment, I sing the line from Weird Al’s “all about the pentiums”. I won’t repeat the line because it’s offensive and that’s not how I feel but I sing it every time. I wonder if anyone else does this too.
  - samwillis 4y ago
    While I agree with you, I think the exception to the rule (and maybe a few others) is the OP of a post, in this case sixhobbets is the OP.
    - MichaelApproved 4y ago
      ::face palm:: Thanks for pointing that out. I will change my downvote to an upvote. Though I did mention that it’s acceptable for someone like OP but only when they explicitly say they’re OP. However, it would be silly for OP to keep mentioning they’re OP in every comment. Reddit is nice in the way they give OPs comment a slight treatment to make it clear they are OP.
      - mynameismon 4y ago
mkl95 4y ago
This is a good argument for rewriting HN in Rust.
- powerhour 4y ago
  While we're at it, can we build a blockchain to store the votes already? It's 2022!
  - VikingCoder 4y ago
    [Can't tell if serious.] Remember the Slashdot equivalent of blockchaining everything? "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!"
  - politelemon 4y ago
    Perhaps we could fund HN by issuing NFTs for each poll response.
    - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
      I'm disappointed that we haven't talked about a) using the GPU to accelerate the poll item sorting (EDIT: I was wrong! Someone did!) b) rewriting not just the backend in Rust, but the whole front-end in Rust, compiling to WebAssembly. (Drawing the whole thing into the canvas instead of using the icky DOM, too!) c) Machine learning wasn't mentioned once
      - water-your-self 4y ago
        Re: c) who do you think writes these comments?
  - mkl95 4y ago
    Vanilla HN votes considered harmful
    - tomrod 4y ago

fbanks 4y ago

$145 - 300

weeksie 4y ago

It's a shame that you can't do a multi part poll. I'd love to know people's rates _and_ their years of experience, language, industry, etc.

m0rissette 4y ago
84.7/hr 15 years experience Polyglot, full stack, DevOps, and Linux Sysmin Industry: Tech Area: Hampton Roads, Virginia
- weeksie 4y ago
  I bet you could raise your rate quite a bit. I'm 20y exp mostly typescript and front ends these days but very much a polyglot background and I run up and down the stack all the time. I charge $225, which tbh I feel is low for my level of expertise. I'm based in NYC but that shouldn't matter as much these days.
TobTobXX 4y ago
The Stackoverflow Survey gives a great insight i to these metrics: https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/ https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022/
- tpxl 4y ago
  'Students' have 4.86 years of professional coding experience according to the survey, which is just weird. Given that, I wouldn't trust the data much.
  - tomjakubowski 4y ago
    Hey now, anyone can be a student for life.
  - culi 4y ago
    Many compsci students I know are now doing internships in their freshmen year. By the time their seniors they're often balancing school with some other sort of ongoing program I'm sure that number is inflated, but there's still some truth to it

hardwaresofton 4y ago

I think there’s successful business (essentially, niche glassdoor) for this. Someone please make it. For more explanation: https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io/editions/012 https://unvalidated-ideas.vadosware.io/editions/012

granshaw 4y ago
A Blind-like site for contracting would be awesome too (Blind is a site where devs mainly discuss salaries)
- hardwaresofton 4y ago
  That’s a GREAT idea. If someone doesn’t pick this idea up (please tell me if you do so I can at least save myself time!) I’ll put something out next week.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

devmor 4y ago

I don't actually have a flat rate, I charge anywhere between $65/hr to $250/hr depending on what I'm doing, where I'm doing it, who I'm working with and most importantly - how exhausting/annoying my client is.

majkinetor 4y ago
Exactly. Fixed rate is not a good idea. Not every job is the same. For instance, if you have to do intervention on highly critical system with risk of reputation loss on any error, you should charge more.
- devmor 4y ago
  And on the same note, I often work with charities and educational orgs who I just don't feel like charging a high rate to, because I want to help with their work.

capableweb 4y ago

Without location (or "remote" specified), this is almost 100% useless. Someone who is top 1% developer in Sudan, working for Sudanese companies will earn way less than even a mediocre freelance developer in a highly developed country.

zdragnar 4y ago
That same Sudanese developer might be convinced to start working remotely if they saw how little they were paid in comparison (assuming national pride / valuing civil service isn't a strong factor).
rutierut 4y ago
I never really got this reasoning. How can you honestly be “best of the best” but be dumb enough to ignore remote work. Something you almost actively have to be doing these days and which, for this hypothetical person, has an insane payoff. This person is supposedly both super smart but at the same time can’t even see the fruit that’s so low-hanging that it’s literally smacking him in the face.
- capableweb 4y ago
  "dumb enough"? Not everyone wants to work remotely. Some people prefer to work with other humans in a physical location. Doesn't make them smarter or dumber, just a preference.
- CalRobert 4y ago
  Not sure. I'm not "best of the best" but I work remote because Americans pay twice as much as Europeans.
bityard 4y ago
Given that the currency is in USD, I assumed a US context was implied.
- capableweb 4y ago
  I don't see why its presumed to be USD specifically. Could be any sort of Dollar, arguably. As far as I know, there are more than ten countries using some sort of "Dollar" which uses the same symbol ("$") for their currency. But yeah, probably safe to assume USD, just playing devils advocate I guess. Even so, on US-based platforms, like reddit or HN, USD is usually used as a "convertion unit" rather than a implication of location, I've found.

toxicFork 4y ago

Reading this post and the linked one, TIL I should charge way more.

secos 4y ago
Usually the case. Patio11 wrote about this forever ago: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-to-charge-more/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-...
nicolas_t 4y ago
And charging more also often has the side effect that you'll be taken more seriously. People are more likely to listen to you if you charge more because they'll place more value in your work.
adrr 4y ago
People always undercharge. Any software consulting agency will charge min $125/hr and most around $175/hr.
- smugma 4y ago
  When I was in business school 15 years ago I interned for a Big 4 consultancy, paid $40/hr (hourly on an $80K assumed salary). Rather than do things by hand like many MBA’s, I wrote some scripts to make it easy to create lots of Excel files (can’t remember if I used a DB, I don’t think so). Client wanted to keep me on during the year, and my employer never had that come up and didn’t know what to do. So client offered me $100/hr and said I could use a different one-guy firm as my employer to avoid new vendor set up. They offered me $100/hr. Being an MBA student I figured I was being undervalued (even at 2.5X, as I was doing both engineering and MBA BS). My manager very firmly but nicely said $100 was an excellent rate. I agreed and did 10-15 hours a week, mostly training 2 employees at the consultancy how to do what I did and move away from my non-standard scripts. Sometimes you’re offered the right rate upfront!

mjh2539 4y ago

The plumber I called recently in the Austin metro area charges $150/hr.

Workaccount2 4y ago
I can't decide if the plumber should be charging more or less. It's hard to put a value on not having to go outside to an outhouse.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  I get the not having to part, but I wish it was acceptable to have one in our backyards. If it’s well built, they’ll be less odourful than a standard toilet/bathroom by drawing air away from where it’s the worst.
- moistly 4y ago
  Are they dealing with blackwater or copper or pex? Because any fool can do pex and soldering honestly doesn’t take much skill, and no amount is too much for dealing with some stranger’s blackwater.
sixhobbits 4y ago
An electrician finishes up a wiring job for a lawyer and presents her with an invoice. The lawyer looks at it and says, "Wow, I don't even charge that much per hour and I'm a lawyer" The electrician says, "Tell me about it. I didn't charge that much when I was a lawyer either"
desireco42 4y ago
Similar in Chicago. Electricans as well
Maximus9000 4y ago
I assume your plumber isn't getting 8 hours per day though. A lot of time in wasted in commuting and paperwork (I assume).
- 4y ago

kator 4y ago

I'm not currently billing for contract work, but when I was my formula was: rate = YearlyGoal / 1700 Which is to say, 2000 hours at 85% billable (leaving time for vacation). Some years I was 105% billable but those are brutal years and I'm sure my life will be shorter for it.

kijin 4y ago
You must have been pretty good at billing every single hour you spend on your clients. I was once told that it's unwise to expect to bill more than 50% of the time I spend, so I've been sticking close to $target_income / 1000 for the last few years. The actual ratio of billable to unbillable hours probably depends a lot on what kind of contracts you get and what type of work you do.

TobbenTM 4y ago

For my full-stack AWS/Node/.Net/React/Vue.js contracts I usually charge 90-150€ depending on clients. 7 years of professional experience.

cj 4y ago

You're going to get wildly different answers from people who 1) Contracting for the same company all the time (common with people outside the US contracting 40 hrs/week with a US company). These hourly rates will be much lower 2) Contracting for many different companies. These hourly rates are much higher because you need to budget for idle time, searching for your next contract, etc.

ghaff 4y ago
As contracting blends into consulting, you can easily get into a situation where your on-the-clock time is very valuable but you're not actually on-the-clock all that much. It doesn't mean you're not doing anything but you may be writing/speaking/researching/etc. for "free."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
MuffinFlavored 4y ago
Is $125/hr for 8 hours a day 5 days a week at a corporation (in lieu of salary) competitive?
- pc86 4y ago
  What's the yearly rate? If you take 3 weeks/year of vacation (standard PTO for a full-time employee in the US), that's $245,000 cash comp. Excluding the SV/HN outliers, that is an extremely good salary for even a senior developer. Until very recently Amazon's cash comp was capped at $160k. Startups lean very heavily on perks and paper stock that is worth nothing 95% of the time. Wider industry (banks, mom/pop shops, design firms, etc) will top out at high 100k/low 200k and usually don't have bonuses more than 3-5% of salary and almost never offer stock.
  - MuffinFlavored 4y ago
    > that is an extremely good salary for even a senior developer. Is there any kind of "outlier" there with like... it's good for a senior developer but not a principal/architect level developer? I'm just curious why the poll on this post has people saying they are making $150-$300/hr... Are they "lying" and it isn't steady 40 hour a week pay?

debacle 4y ago

Varies greatly for me. Generally $120, but only because I give good clients a 20% discount, but I'll go down to $60 for work that I really want to do.

sgjohnson 4y ago

€50-€100

sixhobbits 4y ago

I can't edit it now, but of course it's ambiguous as to where the boundaries lie so please take the upper limits as EXCLUSIVE. e.g. if you charge exactly $100, rather pick $100-$150 and NOT $70-$100.

sixhobbits 4y ago

I think this chart [0] should automatically update with the data from here, but let's see if it works. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTcsaHx997ntDI4L8Glcjj1-NBJ07UpgvJOgncxDWwdRKNBFvF9xK2dYITZ2vlg6Ztdwst7jUEpoh4O/pubhtml?gid=950803344&single=true https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTcsaHx997nt...

tuukkah 4y ago
Thanks! Note that the x axis isn't fully in the correct order.
- sixhobbits 4y ago
  thanks, fixed. Also Google seems to cache aggressively, so it doesn't update even if I edit a cell.
algoatecorn 4y ago
How does this work? Is it populating a spreadsheet with xml?
- sixhobbits 4y ago
  Yes you can do importhtml in a spreadsheet and find the tables or lists so I just used that and then some hacks vlookups to put into a table with the correct ordering

brd529 4y ago

Salesforce is an interesting one - many eng leaders don’t consider it “engineering” because they aren’t that familiar with the platform (often the salesforce devs are grouped in the the salesforce admins in their minds, and organizationally the salesforce devs often sit under IT), so it’s a problem they don’t think about much. Then they are surprised when they find themselves desperately needing the skill set once the business has decided to do a big salesforce thing and not having anyone on hand who a) can do apex / knows salesforce or b) is willing to do it. So they often turn to salesforce speciality agencies and pay through the nose. To answer your question - I’ve seen salesforce agencies bill their developers and designers at a blended rate of $170-$200 for $1M+ projects for onshore (US) talent. I suspect if you are a decent software engineer who knows salesforce well you can probably find clients willing to pay higher rates.

lupire 4y ago
What is Salesforce dev? Is it webapps, but using Salesforce framework instead of RoR or Django?
- te_chris 4y ago
  CTO here, but I built the first bits of our SF setup. It’s essentially a fully cloud hosted rapid development environment that gives you a database and ways to visualise and do crud on this. For line of business stuff this can be really powerful. As a dev, it’s mostly around gluing the bits between and around the key crud actions and doing meta presentation and interface stuff.
- mym1990 4y ago
  Salesforce dev has evolved heavily in the last 10 years. Nowadays, depending on the project, you can be working on integrations most of the time, complex automations, and/or front end development through the Lightning Web Components framework. Last project I did a fair amount of work integrating Salesforce with AWS, using Lambda to talk to other services. It was pretty fun!
- debaserab2 4y ago
  It's usually a soupy mix of salesforce API integration work and wading through tons and tons of programmery-looking user interfaces. It's not hard, but it requires an incredible amount of overhead to first understand various different salesforce specific concepts and then understand the various different broken workflows your company has adopted using those concepts.

phkahler 4y ago

This is important information even for non-contractors. I was interviewing for a position several years ago. They had zero software people at the time (the last guy quit) and one of the hardware engineers in frustration told me they were contracting some company (2 guys in barn) for like $50k a month. Since I would be replacing them I aimed high, but still well below them. Company didn't even question my salary. If I'm not mistaken they gave me "manager" title simply to put my pay in the right bracket, but that also meant my bonus was higher than most the other engineers. Know what a company is willing to pay for work, contract or not.

snowwrestler 4y ago
I will just say that it’s never 1:1 because contractors come with way less benefit and legal baggage than employees. I’ve had a CFO tell me he’s willing to pay 2x-3x salary to get the same work from contractors.
- adrian_b 4y ago
  Also any contractor has to request 2x-3x more than when receiving a salary, to cover for extra expenses and taxes and for extra risks (time when no contract is obtained).
- phkahler 4y ago
  >> I’ve had a CFO tell me he’s willing to pay 2x-3x salary I took that into account. I made between 100k and 200k per year vs the other guys 600k for the same work, which I arguably did better since it was my specialty. The company really was being taken for a ride by the contractors (if what I was told was true).
  - joshspankit 4y ago
    Companies being taken for a ride by contractors: 100% happens. I’ve seen it first hand from the head offices. In both cases it was “we’re going with product X because it’s supposed to be the best. Does anyone here have expertise in it? No? Good thing the vendor has trusted partners.” One contracting company had the audacity to fly in two carloads of “experts” before the system was even set up. They lingered and deflected even the most basic questions about the product.

slowmotiony 4y ago

These $300+ guys must be COBOL programmers

Nextgrid 4y ago
The reason there's a COBOL developer shortage and every shitty company is crying is because they're not actually paying very well. If they were willing to pay that much there would be no problems finding COBOL people.
- anm89 4y ago
  Yeah I had this misconception as well. These guys are very poorly paid a lot of the time.

nicolas_t 4y ago

Started at $40/hour, met someone who told me I was hugely undercharging for my services and devaluing my work, so increased to $100/hour (which improved my relationship with my clients and had the nice side effect of being taken seriously), then $125, $150 and eventually had a couple of clients I wasn't that keen on that I decided to charge $300 per hour to see if they'd balk or not. They didn't. It does mean that now the majority of my work is the work for those exhausting clients that pay very well. Not great for my work/life balance, great for my bank account.

wpietri 4y ago
Yes, yes, yes. So many technical people vastly undercharge. My firm experience is that the more you charge, the better people listen.
granshaw 4y ago
What kind of work if you don’t mind me asking? And do you get embedded in a team like their other engineers or solo?
orblivion 4y ago
Do you increase to $100 with the leverage of new clients willing to pay that much, or do you just say "yeah I'm $100 now"?
- ianmcgowan 4y ago
  It would be poor form to change rates mid-project, and difficult to do if there's a formal agreement or statement of work involved. As I get to the end of a project I start looking around for something new, if there's more than one option I use rate to help decide which one to do. If one project (A) is more interesting or I like the customer better, they get the current rate $x quoted, but the other (B) gets $x+25. With an offer from B in hand, it's easier to ask A to match, and almost always they do. Same with salary negotiations - much easier to negotiate from a position with options.
  - 4y ago

arcticbull 4y ago

A good rule of thumb is to take your annual salary and divide by 1000. That's your hourly rate. If you make $100K, charge $100/hr - which if fully booked is like $200K if you did it full time. That accounts for your overhead, your pipeline not always being full, etc.

gk1 4y ago
The overhead on an employee is more like 20–30%, not 100%. Separately, the value of a contractor is different than the value of an employee, so why should the prices be equivalent (even taking overhead into account). As a contractor, you're not only help the client with a project but you're also saving them the time, effort, and risk of bringing someone in full-time... Why not charge for that?
- arcticbull 4y ago
  > The overhead on an employee is more like 20–30%, not 100%. That's a separate question, and personally I prefer double as a rule of thumb (I've read some studies to support that number) - but 20% is outright wrong. You'd pay 20% for office space rent alone. Employer portion of payroll taxes are 7.65% and health insurance in the group markets is $600/mth. Then add in legal, hardware, software, servers, HR tools, accountants - it adds up fast. However my point was that it accounts not just for your overhead (remember you have significantly worse economy of scale at 1) but also, and this is critical, your pipeline not always being full. As a contractor you won't always have a job, and you should account for that in your estimation. > As a contractor, you're not only help the client with a project but you're also saving them the time, effort, and risk of bringing someone in full-time... Why not charge for that? You are, about double. Like I said, $100K/yr -> $100/hr is $208K/yr. This isn't a perfect system, but it's a good rule of thumb. [1] https://www.iofficecorp.com/blog/space-management-empty-desk https://www.iofficecorp.com/blog/space-management-empty-desk

stuff4ben 4y ago

For those in the US, how much do you all pay for "benefits"? Healthcare, etc...

vdqtp3 4y ago
An FTE will pay anywhere from $200-$1000/mo for single person healthcare (subsidized by the employer. A contractor will pay closer to $1000-2000/mo for similar coverage. Retirement is pretty shit even when company matched, so the numbers are mostly even between contractor and FTE.
bluedino 4y ago
The easy solution to this is have a spouse that has a fulltime job and has benefits.

clusterhacks 4y ago

I did side consulting at $70 for someone getting a business off the ground. After the company was more up and running, I switched to a flat $1,000 per day to avoid being asked to do too many "small" tasks.

ascendantlogic 4y ago

who are these poor souls in the "Under $20" and "$20-$40" range?

artogahr 4y ago
Me, used to do full-time-style remote contract work for a company in Europe, and my hourly rate was $10/h. Granted it was still good money compared to where I live, but there you go. Now moved to and working in Europe as a TAC engineer for $18.5/h.
vbezhenar 4y ago
I live in KZ, I'm not sure if I'm qualified as a contractor as I mostly work for the same company, but technically I'm contractor. My current rate is around $15. I'm making like 3x of everyone around me, so not really poor.
- seabrookmx 4y ago
  > so not really poor I think this highlights an issue with this poll: the potentially huge disparity in cost of living. Where I live (Western Canada) this is below our minimum wage mandated by law. But renting a single bedroom apartment is also nearing $2000/month.
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    I own single bedroom apartments and my monthly payment is $20 for electricity, water, etc and $10 for Internet. Plus $10 at winter for heating. Renting single bedroom apartment must be something around $500 here for good apartments and down to $200 if you're not very picky (we don't really use concept of bedroom, we use total number of rooms excluding kitchen, and one-room apartments probably are most popular for renting).
wingerlang 4y ago
I did some freelance work for $30 which is matching my current salary, which is actually very high over here (Thailand, iOS developer). I never went all in on freelancing, so it's hard to push for high salaries. Most 'remote' I've found is just within-america-remotely or Europe, etc, as well.

danielvaughn 4y ago

I tailor my price quite a bit based on what I want. At my best, I feel I'm worth about $200/hour. But I like to work with very early stage companies, and they rarely can afford that. Plus, I've entered into a stage of my life where I just find it hard to really push myself. I like having a relaxing job that I don't need to think too hard about, i.e. I don't really feel like being worth $200/hour. So these days I've been varying between $50-75/hour.

lupire 4y ago
Don't think about how hard you work. Think about how much longer the young inexperienced person would have to work hard to match your results. Think about how much time you dnt spend on mistakes on the way to completion, and bake that multiplier into your rate.
- jdjslskshdj 4y ago
  This resonated with me, thank you for writing this.
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  Very true, that's a great way to think about it.
pc86 4y ago
Honestly I get this. I was charging $175-200/hr for years, 2-5 hours/week on top of my full-time dev job. Now I've taken easier gigs for $90/hr, and do ~10 hours/week on top of my EM job and it feels 10x better.

up_and_up 4y ago

I stopped charging hourly, now just monthly retainer. Making around $800 per hour, depending on the month.

wallawe 4y ago
can you elaborate a little more and explain the mechanics of this setup?
- up_and_up 4y ago
  This is for a part-time gig. I charge a set amount per month up to a max number of hours worked. If I work 1 hour or 10 it doesnt matter. Usually I only work 2.5 hours a month hence the high hourly rate.
- MisterBastahrd 4y ago
  I also charge on retainer. I set a dollar amount that makes messing with their stuff worth my time, and then they get to tell me what I'm supposed to do for them that month for those hours. If they don't talk to me, I still get paid. If they go over, then I get an extra hourly rate.
  - jrib 4y ago
    how many hours per month are usually retained?
efa 4y ago
1.6 mil a year. That's not too shabby.
PainfullyNormal 4y ago
Is that mostly in DevOps?
- up_and_up 4y ago
  Mostly Rails development

reachableceo 4y ago

120.00 per hour plus expenses . Payable at time of delivery.

dustingetz 4y ago

dominant factor here is how rich your customer is

marpstar 4y ago

I only moonlight, but my rates are dependent on non-profit status, locality, and size of the company. The rate I charge Fortune 500 companies ($150/hr) is about twice that I charge the local library ($80/hr).

lupire 4y ago
Non-profit just means money goes to employees and managers, not investors. Focus more on the social value of the work the business does, and how fairly emooyees are paid, not legal tax status.
sriram_sun 4y ago
If you're moonlighting Fortune 500 companies will rarely talk to you directly. So my guess is that you are contracting with a company that is either directly contracting with the Fortune 500 company or is itself a subcontractor. The $150 per hour that makes its way to you is probably seeing a few levels of attrition :-)!
- HeyLaughingBoy 4y ago
  I moonlight behind an LLC for exactly this reason. I got an F500 client a long time ago and I was nervous that they'd figure out that my Sole Proprietorship was just me (don't even remember why I thought that), so one night I went to the Secretary of State website and registered an LLC and once that was done, got a tax EIN from the IRS. Completely unnecessary at the time, it turned out, but over the years I've found that a lot of people are more comfortable working with Joe Blow LLC than just Joe Blow.

ukoki 4y ago

For the Europeans feeling US numbers are unattainable: I'm on £1100/day in London with about 8 years devops/cloud/IaaS experience

hankchinaski 4y ago
Is that inside or outside ir35? This is CTO-Head Of level pay for a contractor in london. Unless you work in a hedge-fund, in which case that is attainable even as a IC
- ukoki 4y ago
  Inside sadly, but my previous contract was 950 outside.
DoingIsLearning 4y ago
I have been in consulting for several years and then back to permanent positions. What advice do you have for people who are happy to do technical work but find too stressful (in terms of 'people skills') to manage clients and the networking side of sourcing clients?
- lupire 4y ago
  Find someone to pimp you out for 25-50%.
  - pc86 4y ago
    Standard rate is 30% for placement of permanent positions (e.g. recruiters) and 10% for contract.
    - Silhouette 4y ago
      30% for how long though? 10% seems low for a UK recruitment agency placing contractors in software dev or similar fields unless we're talking about relatively long engagements and the recruiter fees continue throughout.

wiremine 4y ago

This is useful, but it is HIGHLY dependent on the services being offered. $300 for some work can be a steal, and $40 can be overpriced.

moralestapia 4y ago

Talk about synchronicity, I was just researching this for a gig I got involved with. Just to be clear, contractor means you get no other benefit but the money they give you per hour worked. And this rate is not inclusive of expenses, taxes, etc...

paulschreiber 4y ago

Amounts should be $20-39, $40-69, $70-99 to avoid overlap.

Beltiras 4y ago

I used to take 125$/hour but haven't felt the need to take on clients for a while (dayjob is plenty for me). If I were to joint the hustle again, it wouldn't be at less than 250.

jimmydean1765 4y ago

In 2005 I was doing PLC programming and didn’t even have my degree finished yet. I always quoted $100 per hour and was never turned down. Being that it’s 17 years later and I’d assume most of you have some sort of formal certification then I’d say you’re undervaluing yourself. Is it still typical to register a business as a contractor and invoice for your hours as an independent? If so you need to add at least 35% just for business overhead. IMH0

jimmydean1765 4y ago
To clarify. I don’t only mean your own business overhead, as I assume you can operate a basic contracting business for less than 35% of annual earnings. What I mean is that employees cost businesses around a 35% premium for benefits, employee side payroll taxes, liabilities, etc. In actual fact if all my employees were happy to take a 35% pay increase to become contractors I’d bet it’s a good deal for the corporation.
bluedino 4y ago
There's probably not a million PLC programmers on Upwork/Fiver/whatever

kareemm 4y ago

I've moved my effective hourly rate from $250/h to up to $1k/h by billing on a project basis. I did this after I ran across Jonathan Stark's book Hourly Billing is Nuts[1] and implemented a lot of his advice. The two best things I've done to increase my effective hourly rate and my topline revenue in my solo consulting practice have been 1) taking his advice to ditch hourly billing and 2) niching down to focus on Trial to Paid conversion[2]. 1 - https://jonathanstark.com/hbin https://jonathanstark.com/hbin 2 - http://www.trialtopaid.com http://www.trialtopaid.com

crpietschmann 4y ago
Interesting you say you use http://www.trialtopaid.com http://www.trialtopaid.com to make money when that site is down...
- kareemm 4y ago
  https://www.trialtopaid.com https://www.trialtopaid.com (https) doesn't work right now but http://www.trialtopaid.com http://www.trialtopaid.com (http) redirects to my consulting site https://www.reemer.com https://www.reemer.com. If you're using an extension that only does https you won't get redirected. Haven't bothered setting TTP.com up properly yet. Shoeless cobbler's kids, etc.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - goldenkey 4y ago
    +1 doctor who smokes.
Aeolun 4y ago
How do you bill on a project basis? Half the people say that billing anything other than hourly is nuts, and the other group says anything other than fixed price is nuts.
- 4y ago

tgtweak 4y ago

I don't even do hourly billing any more - after seeing how miserable many of my friends in the legal world were despite their high salaries and billable rates. If you can't capture a percentage of the value you're generating, you're not properly focused on generating value. This is what really turned around my ARR on advising. Not true for all levels of advising/consulting, but at the executive/founder level this was the big change.

archi42 4y ago

It's also important to consider the type of company and the type of work done: A single person or small team doing contracting work will have a different (likely smaller) overhead than larger companies. OTOH having more people allows for a wider array of capabilities, or being able to tackle larger projects, or develop internal tools for higher efficiency.

bmitc 4y ago

I am curious. Do all contractors do hourly billing or do some work on weekly or monthly rates or just per project rates? Hourly billing seems hard for contracting.

gk1 4y ago
If you want to earn more for the value you provide, monthly retainers or project fees are the way to go.

majestic5762 4y ago

I raised $2M by developing a full e2e white-labeled crypto crowdfunding solution as an entrepreneur(as a solo dev anyway), but I make 50$/h as a solo dev for any other side gig. And I took care of everything, from legal, accounting, infra, dev team, marketing, and business. Guess I'm undervalued as an individual and not as a corporation? Take away: incorporate yourself

m1117 4y ago

[Delete maybe] I'd also like a poll on how much taxes the contractors pay

ArtemZ 4y ago

36$/hour as a Senior DevOps Engineer

kretaceous 4y ago

I will piggyback on the thread to ask something that I've been thinking about contracting/freelancing. Is contracting an ideal job for people who don't work well in teams? By "don't work well", I don't necessarily mean rude or intolerable people. I mean more like, doing all the work on your own, going out of your way to work on something, working without being told, etc. Also, how to start your career as a developer on contract?

pc86 4y ago
You need contacts/referrals to start. If you don't have those, you're going to end up getting very low-paid shit work for shit people. Nearly half of my contracts have been former employers, or companies where a former manager/coworker was and got me an interview. The rest have been referrals from those companies. Cold outreach or inbound is a small minority (<10% for sure).
- ciekawy 4y ago
  as for how to start there are also contracting companies like eg Toptal with decent amount of projects from variety of companies from startups to enterprises and you're setting your own rate - probably not above the median but still good enough to start.
olau 4y ago
Well, could be. You do need to be self-driven, and also be able to see the bigger picture so you actually help your clients. I think some distance is helpful, too. Some clients can be really dysfunctional in the sense that they will spend all day talking about things in meetings, and never do anything about it, probably because they're not comfortable bringing about the changes. That's why they hired you. You're the change agent. But communication is important. There's no boss to set the expectations or clear up misunderstandings for you, you need to do that yourself, carefully. If you think you'll find it difficult to bother explaining things to people, then you probably need to contract on something where you can communicate through a version control system.
ciekawy 4y ago

therusskiy 4y ago

I remember when I was starting out (~2 years of professional experience at the time) I was contracting as a ROR fullstack developer for a San Francisco startup for $17/h. Local salary in Russia as Java developer before that was around $2.6/h. So that I felt pretty rich doing that. I remember I used to only bill for like 70% of hours I worked because I felt bad if there was some task that I couldn't implement right away or a bug I had to figure out. These days my rate is about $60/h working for a US company with 9 years of experience.

haspok 4y ago

Which continent, which country, which region, which city? Without this information this poll is meaningless.

5350-uiop-1130 4y ago

big difference between a $300 p/h client a $20 p/h client. guessing the former is from prior connections, employers, word of mouth and the latter from contracting services.

brk 4y ago

$500/hr, on average.

nathias 4y ago

$35 senior front-end / medior backend, EU costs of living about 2k for essentials

vasergen 4y ago

A bit of off-topic, but do you as a contractors have time for personal growth. What I mean, is it possible you will be reading a book on some topics or taking webinar / course whatever and being paid for that?

siwatanejo 4y ago
Why not? Just don't work 40h a week and then you have time.

clavalle 4y ago

Depends on the length of the contract. Super short term contracts (measured in hours): $250/hr (though I might raise this after looking at this thread!) Short term contracts: $200/hr Longer term contracts: $175/hr Retainer: $125 a month I'm not a full-time contractor, though, so these rates are designed so that people and organizations that really need my help (and I generally have some previous relationship with) can get it if they really need it without wasting my time on unimportant projects. I'm a generalist I design and build software and run teams that do the same (super descriptive, huh?)

jdjslskshdj 4y ago

I've been doing web dev (react) contracting for 8 months now. First months was 50 and 60/hr, then big, main contract at 100, now 160 as a part time. Quite the learning experience, and goes to show how far confidence will take you.

philip1209 4y ago

Another question for freelancers: What's your ratio of deep work to shallow work? With coding, intensity impacts how long you can work. In the book Deep Work, Cal Newport says that ~4 hours per day of high-intensity focus is about the limit. So, how many hours do you bill per day on average - and of those hours, what's the breakdown of high-intensity vs. other work?

iDoMagento 4y ago

72€/h (+20% VAT on the invoice). 7+ years of Magento development experience for the local SMB market, Estonia. Just for reference, Magento is a huge monolithic e-commerce platform (PHP + jQuery + knockoutjs + xml - hello 2012!) that doesn't seem to be very popular amongst the HN crowd. I do it all from the frontend to integrations with ERPs, client tutorials/ handholding, hosting/devops etc etc. 0 marketing, all clients through word of mouth basically. Most follow a similar pattern: larger agency develops some almost working solution over a few years, developers leave and take in-house project specific knowledge with them, client left hanging and agency bills huge amounts for no progress and the relationship sours. Most end up being long-term clients since the market for Magento devs is horrific, e-commerce never sleeps and the tech keeps on churning. Who wants to do primarily legacy maintenance work, right? To my surprise, it's actually very rewarding because of the close contact with the primary stakeholders. I manage around 20 billable hours a week, all remote since the beginning. I say manage because having a 2year old run around takes the other 20 to 80. I have way too much work piled up already and yet here I am writing this comment for some reason...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

lumoe 4y ago

I currently charge 65€/hour, which is incredibly low considering that beside doing the fullstack development for their rather complex product. I also do their product development, working with UI/UX designers, doing the devops AND I do first to third level support (basically for free). Still, I was unable to explain this to the customer, who still sees me as the guy who does some programming. For future companies, I want to move to project based billing (as already mentioned in previous comments) and stop underselling my work. Any recommendation on how I can train pitching myself or good readings are very welcome.

anm89 4y ago

$90 but it is guaranteed 40+ hr / week and has been consistent over years

acquacow 4y ago

I do federal contracting for a parent company and I get billed out around $320-350/hr as far as I can tell. I, of course, only see a fraction of that though =P

throwAway42jlk8 4y ago

$90 per hour remotely for a US company. As a Django developer from the UK this rate is really good for me, plus it is outside IR35. I doubt I'd be able to get this at a UK company.

Leftium 4y ago

Visual graph of poll results: https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/32606904 https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/32606904