5 ms·

Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK)

73 points by cwan 15y ago

davedx 15y ago
My gf works for a recruitment company in the Netherlands, and my general feeling looking at these results is that they're on the low side. Senior developers here charge in the region of 50-70 euros/hour, or about 450 euros/day. I'm fairly sure a senior with plenty of experience in an in-demand technology can push the 70 up into the 80-90 rate, and niche areas like SAP can be even higher.
- pmjordan 15y ago
  It's not stated specifically in the article, but from the large number of respondents who offer act as both designer and developer, I suspect this survey is focused on web freelancers, as opposed to developers in general. I would expect to be able to charge far less for generic CMS-backed web site building than for more specialist areas.
  - talkingquickly 15y ago
    Agree, I think there's a proportion of freelancers who do a mixture of boilerplate CMS development and backend development who have very different day rates for each just because the going rate for each is so different. It would be interesting to see the fraq.info web app expanded to include and use data from an ongoing survey which distinguishes between types of development.
- ticks 15y ago
  Perhaps the rates are higher in the Netherlands because taxes are much higher compared to the UK. Even for people who work full time and benefit from the expat discount, it's still quite a bit more. So there's a higher cost of living.
  - charlesdm 15y ago
    I'd say this is not the case. For example, taxes in Belgium are higher than the UK and average rates are lower than the UK.
- tijs 15y ago
  Are UK rates really that much lower than Dutch (NL) rates? In my experience (both as a freelancer and in hiring freelancers) is that in all areas of web development and design hourly rates start at €40 for wordpress stuff (charging less would be considered amateur range) up to €120 for really specific skills with most developers and designers charging around €60-€80. Even with these rates it's pretty damn hard to find decent Python/PHP/Ruby or front-end devs. Designers (and Flash devs) are a bit easier to find as we are not lacking design/art schools. Could it be there are simply more technically schooled people in the UK driving down prices?
acangiano 15y ago
£300 per day. That's £37.50/hr before taxes. Peanuts if you are a consultant.
- mattmanser 15y ago
  And you are a Software Developer and Technical Evangelist for IBM from Toronto, Canada. I don't see how you added anything to the conversation. Perhaps in your wisdom you could share what the difference is between a contractor and consultant and how to get these non 'peanut' jobs. For example my old company provided consultants at £900 a day, probably still peanuts in your book, but these were employees who took a standard salary at less than £300 p/d and that money had to pay for salespeople, pre-contract technical support, offices, secretaries, etc. and all the effort on lost jobs as well as the actual work. As a freelancer you don't have all those costs.
  - acangiano 15y ago
    No reason to be patronizing or get personal, Matt. And I didn't mean to be disrespectful to those who earn even a third of that rate. My point is that the rate appears to be very much on the lower end of the scale. Which is a bit sad for professionals with over a decade of honing highly specific skills. However the same rate can mean different things, depending on the context. - Remote worker on Elance: dream rate. Unusual in fact. - Employee working 40 hours a week: very good rate. - Contractor assigned to several projects throughout the year, with different companies, but essentially full-time for weeks at end: still good rate. - Your typical consultant who has to promote themselves to get new clients, go on client's site (possibly with travel involved), etc, will normally book far less than 40 hours a week, even if they end up working 40+ hours to run their consulting business. In such a case £37.50 often ends up being peanuts. Common rates I see around here are about $100-150/hr for expert developers, exactly because of all the overhead of consulting. That's why in my, admittedly very short, initial message I said "consultant" and not the generic term freelancer or contractor. I understand that you may have an issue with the term I used and the distinction from freelancer, but that's how I meant it.
    - 15y ago
10101010010012 15y ago
This seems low, speaking as a UK dev. It massively depends on the work you're actually doing though.
dangravell 15y ago
These figures feel a little on the low side. When I first did some freelance work, I used the tables at http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contract.aspx?page=1&sortby=0&orderby=0&q=&id=900&lid=2618 http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contract.aspx?page=1&sortby... to help work out a rate. There seems quite a difference between hourly and daily rate.
lazy_b 15y ago
Wow. I guess dev in the us is a lot more expensive. I will say that a mechanic at the tire shop that fixes my car charges $92 an hour for his time, and I feel some obligation to charge more than that, with my fancy high school diploma and noticeable absence of gang tattoos, felonies, etc.
- blacksmythe 15y ago
  >> mechanic at the tire shop that fixes my car charges $92 an hour for his time This is not a valid comparison - he probably gets 40% of this, the rest goes to the shop. As a comparison, how much would a company charge for your time? Typically 2.5x your base salary (before benefits).
omouse 15y ago
If you're a Canadian, you can join the Canadian Freelance Union: http://www.cfunion.ca/ http://www.cfunion.ca/ They do contract reviews and they have some kind of deal on health benefits. They're also a local of the much larger Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union which has something like 150,000 members in it. Yes there's a market for low-cost work, but don't sell yourself short as others in the comments are saying. Let's get that minimum rate a little higher ;)
dotBen 15y ago
As a British native who began his career in the UK and later moved to San Francisco, I can tell you that the going rates for developers (can't really speak about designers) is a lot lower in the UK than in the US. It's part of the reason I moved here. Switching to salary-paid positions for a moment (as they might be easier to compare to your own compensation), £28k (~US$44k) seems to be a going rate for a mid-level developer and £40k (~US$62.5k) for a senior developer in London right now. Ignore financial services-based engineering positions, although there are a lot less of those today. Current equivalent in SF right now could be $75-$90k for a mid-level developer and $100-$150k for a senior developer (or more). Keep in mind London is a more expensive city to live in than even SF, taxes are higher (yes even compared to CA+Fed), health insurance isn't included (ok, we have socialized medicine but my point is that's part of your comp here in US), sales tax in UK is 20%, and unlike the US you have to pay property tax (council tax) on the property you live in regardless of whether you rent or own it. Living in the UK, especially London, is incredibly expensive and I sometimes wonder how I managed frankly :P EDIT: Oh and the reason I think wages and rates are low is because software engineering isn't a primary industry in London and a great deal of developers end up working for marketing agencies etc where they are simply "code monkeys". The BBC is another big employer (my former employer) but they only pay non-commercial wages as they are a public-service and it (used to be) seen as prestigious to work there.
- Jabbles 15y ago
  £28k is a low graduate salary in the UK. The first proper result for "graduate software engineer" is Red Gate, who obviously only recruit the top graduates, but still: http://www.red-gate.com/our-company/careers/current-opportunities/graduate-software-engineer http://www.red-gate.com/our-company/careers/current-opportun...
  - robgough 15y ago
    Do you know many devs getting that outside London for a non-finance sector straight out of Uni? I certainly don't.
  - dotBen 15y ago
    Under the current economic climate, many graduates don't even find grad-level work and end up taking under-employment - the competition for the grad jobs that are out there is driving down salaries. I also know people who 10 years after graduating are still not making £35k, although that's not specifically in the field of computer science. It's rough back home right now :/
jasonkester 15y ago
"anything under £100 I removed as I felt this could not easily be distinguished between daily and hourly rate." So basically, he threw away all the data from people quoting high hourly rates, and now we're seeing a bunch of discussion here that can be summed up as "Gee, that seems a bit low, doesn't it?"
- citricsquid 15y ago
  No, he threw away data from people who put under £100 in a daily rate and didn't explicitly state it was an hourly rate. He threw away ambiguous data, yes it sucks data was lost but it means better "integrity" of the final results.
  - meric 15y ago
    Data between $100 to $200 could be ambiguous too. I think there's no way to save the integrity of the final results. It'd still have been nice to see a graph though.
  - jasonkester 15y ago
    Don't you find it a bit suspicious that after throwing away all those numbers, he was left with nobody at all billing more than £75/hr? And realistically, is there anybody here in the UK who is not a builder's apprentice and charges less than £100 per day? Think there are any computer programmers billing out at £12/hr here? I don't think the data was in any way ambiguous. And since he threw it out, he pretty much invalidated his survey.
IgorPartola 15y ago
Minor point, but I thought median is a better statistic compared to a mean when talking about compensation.

73 points by cwan 15y ago

My gf works for a recruitment company in the Netherlands, and my general feeling looking at these results is that they're on the low side. Senior developers here charge in the region of 50-70 euros/hour, or about 450 euros/day. I'm fairly sure a senior with plenty of experience in an in-demand technology can push the 70 up into the 80-90 rate, and niche areas like SAP can be even higher.

pmjordan 15y ago
It's not stated specifically in the article, but from the large number of respondents who offer act as both designer and developer, I suspect this survey is focused on web freelancers, as opposed to developers in general. I would expect to be able to charge far less for generic CMS-backed web site building than for more specialist areas.
- talkingquickly 15y ago
  Agree, I think there's a proportion of freelancers who do a mixture of boilerplate CMS development and backend development who have very different day rates for each just because the going rate for each is so different. It would be interesting to see the fraq.info web app expanded to include and use data from an ongoing survey which distinguishes between types of development.
ticks 15y ago
Perhaps the rates are higher in the Netherlands because taxes are much higher compared to the UK. Even for people who work full time and benefit from the expat discount, it's still quite a bit more. So there's a higher cost of living.
- charlesdm 15y ago
  I'd say this is not the case. For example, taxes in Belgium are higher than the UK and average rates are lower than the UK.
tijs 15y ago
Are UK rates really that much lower than Dutch (NL) rates? In my experience (both as a freelancer and in hiring freelancers) is that in all areas of web development and design hourly rates start at €40 for wordpress stuff (charging less would be considered amateur range) up to €120 for really specific skills with most developers and designers charging around €60-€80. Even with these rates it's pretty damn hard to find decent Python/PHP/Ruby or front-end devs. Designers (and Flash devs) are a bit easier to find as we are not lacking design/art schools. Could it be there are simply more technically schooled people in the UK driving down prices?

acangiano 15y ago

£300 per day. That's £37.50/hr before taxes. Peanuts if you are a consultant.

mattmanser 15y ago
And you are a Software Developer and Technical Evangelist for IBM from Toronto, Canada. I don't see how you added anything to the conversation. Perhaps in your wisdom you could share what the difference is between a contractor and consultant and how to get these non 'peanut' jobs. For example my old company provided consultants at £900 a day, probably still peanuts in your book, but these were employees who took a standard salary at less than £300 p/d and that money had to pay for salespeople, pre-contract technical support, offices, secretaries, etc. and all the effort on lost jobs as well as the actual work. As a freelancer you don't have all those costs.
- acangiano 15y ago
  No reason to be patronizing or get personal, Matt. And I didn't mean to be disrespectful to those who earn even a third of that rate. My point is that the rate appears to be very much on the lower end of the scale. Which is a bit sad for professionals with over a decade of honing highly specific skills. However the same rate can mean different things, depending on the context. - Remote worker on Elance: dream rate. Unusual in fact. - Employee working 40 hours a week: very good rate. - Contractor assigned to several projects throughout the year, with different companies, but essentially full-time for weeks at end: still good rate. - Your typical consultant who has to promote themselves to get new clients, go on client's site (possibly with travel involved), etc, will normally book far less than 40 hours a week, even if they end up working 40+ hours to run their consulting business. In such a case £37.50 often ends up being peanuts. Common rates I see around here are about $100-150/hr for expert developers, exactly because of all the overhead of consulting. That's why in my, admittedly very short, initial message I said "consultant" and not the generic term freelancer or contractor. I understand that you may have an issue with the term I used and the distinction from freelancer, but that's how I meant it.
  - 15y ago

10101010010012 15y ago

This seems low, speaking as a UK dev. It massively depends on the work you're actually doing though.

dangravell 15y ago

These figures feel a little on the low side. When I first did some freelance work, I used the tables at http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contract.aspx?page=1&sortby=0&orderby=0&q=&id=900&lid=2618 http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contract.aspx?page=1&sortby... to help work out a rate. There seems quite a difference between hourly and daily rate.

lazy_b 15y ago

Wow. I guess dev in the us is a lot more expensive. I will say that a mechanic at the tire shop that fixes my car charges $92 an hour for his time, and I feel some obligation to charge more than that, with my fancy high school diploma and noticeable absence of gang tattoos, felonies, etc.

blacksmythe 15y ago
>> mechanic at the tire shop that fixes my car charges $92 an hour for his time This is not a valid comparison - he probably gets 40% of this, the rest goes to the shop. As a comparison, how much would a company charge for your time? Typically 2.5x your base salary (before benefits).

omouse 15y ago

If you're a Canadian, you can join the Canadian Freelance Union: http://www.cfunion.ca/ http://www.cfunion.ca/ They do contract reviews and they have some kind of deal on health benefits. They're also a local of the much larger Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union which has something like 150,000 members in it. Yes there's a market for low-cost work, but don't sell yourself short as others in the comments are saying. Let's get that minimum rate a little higher ;)

dotBen 15y ago

As a British native who began his career in the UK and later moved to San Francisco, I can tell you that the going rates for developers (can't really speak about designers) is a lot lower in the UK than in the US. It's part of the reason I moved here. Switching to salary-paid positions for a moment (as they might be easier to compare to your own compensation), £28k (~US$44k) seems to be a going rate for a mid-level developer and £40k (~US$62.5k) for a senior developer in London right now. Ignore financial services-based engineering positions, although there are a lot less of those today. Current equivalent in SF right now could be $75-$90k for a mid-level developer and $100-$150k for a senior developer (or more). Keep in mind London is a more expensive city to live in than even SF, taxes are higher (yes even compared to CA+Fed), health insurance isn't included (ok, we have socialized medicine but my point is that's part of your comp here in US), sales tax in UK is 20%, and unlike the US you have to pay property tax (council tax) on the property you live in regardless of whether you rent or own it. Living in the UK, especially London, is incredibly expensive and I sometimes wonder how I managed frankly :P EDIT: Oh and the reason I think wages and rates are low is because software engineering isn't a primary industry in London and a great deal of developers end up working for marketing agencies etc where they are simply "code monkeys". The BBC is another big employer (my former employer) but they only pay non-commercial wages as they are a public-service and it (used to be) seen as prestigious to work there.

Jabbles 15y ago
£28k is a low graduate salary in the UK. The first proper result for "graduate software engineer" is Red Gate, who obviously only recruit the top graduates, but still: http://www.red-gate.com/our-company/careers/current-opportunities/graduate-software-engineer http://www.red-gate.com/our-company/careers/current-opportun...
- robgough 15y ago
  Do you know many devs getting that outside London for a non-finance sector straight out of Uni? I certainly don't.
- dotBen 15y ago
  Under the current economic climate, many graduates don't even find grad-level work and end up taking under-employment - the competition for the grad jobs that are out there is driving down salaries. I also know people who 10 years after graduating are still not making £35k, although that's not specifically in the field of computer science. It's rough back home right now :/

jasonkester 15y ago

"anything under £100 I removed as I felt this could not easily be distinguished between daily and hourly rate." So basically, he threw away all the data from people quoting high hourly rates, and now we're seeing a bunch of discussion here that can be summed up as "Gee, that seems a bit low, doesn't it?"

citricsquid 15y ago
No, he threw away data from people who put under £100 in a daily rate and didn't explicitly state it was an hourly rate. He threw away ambiguous data, yes it sucks data was lost but it means better "integrity" of the final results.
- meric 15y ago
  Data between $100 to $200 could be ambiguous too. I think there's no way to save the integrity of the final results. It'd still have been nice to see a graph though.
- jasonkester 15y ago
  Don't you find it a bit suspicious that after throwing away all those numbers, he was left with nobody at all billing more than £75/hr? And realistically, is there anybody here in the UK who is not a builder's apprentice and charges less than £100 per day? Think there are any computer programmers billing out at £12/hr here? I don't think the data was in any way ambiguous. And since he threw it out, he pretty much invalidated his survey.

IgorPartola 15y ago

Minor point, but I thought median is a better statistic compared to a mean when talking about compensation.