6 ms·
Ask HN: What is the highest hourly billing rate that you have ever heard of?
Doesn’t matter if it’s engineering, law, or cotton picking. The only requisite is that you must have first-hand knowledge that an unrelated entity (to the contractor) has paid this astronomical rate.
- CraigRo 3y ago1100 for lawyers
- gloyoyo 3y ago$10,000. Knowing which screw to turn, apparently fixing a supercomputer.
- gravitate 3y ago> Knowing which screw to turn "It took me ten years to know how do this in 10 minutes"
- kypro 3y agoGiven a lot us here are engineers, we should acknowledge that knowing with certainty which screw needs to be turned and by what amount is generally far more valuable than someone who knows how to turn a screw so takes a crack at it.
- h2odragon 3y ago1982, I think. $1,500/hr. There was this massive seed drill machine called a "Maxi Cultivator" that was more complicated than a combined harvester and made in Italy, had to be pulled by a SAME (aka Lamborghini) tractor with a ground speed PTO, all sorts of "prototype" madness for a million dollar machine. I worked for a company that was the USA side of the partnership to demonstrate and hopefully sell these machines to farmers doing the new "no-till" style planting. We had this thing ready to go, the day before some big farm day show, and the test runs broke something deep. So this Italian master mechanic dude gets flown to the wilds of West TN overnight to fix this machine right now. Spoke no English, but he and our mechanics were able to communicate quite effectively. Sign language and profanity are universal. He got it fixed in 4hr and the show went on; he hung around for the rest of event just in case, I think on the manufacturer's dime. I recall the bitching about the rate he got billed at later.
- UomoNeroNero 3y agoItalian master mechanic ... profanity I can see it (i am italian and i know how profanity can help to solve problems)
- Quinzel 3y agoI know a person who bills $3,500 for a basic 30 min general anaesthetic ($7k an hour). That cost does not include the surgeons fee, or the cost of the consumables, or the cost of the operating room. The operating room itself is about $150 a minute. Consumables are astronomical (anything medical is just expensive) and surgeon’s fee’s depend on the surgeon and also the specialty. Ranging from like $5k to about $60k (the most I’ve ever known to be charged) for a single procedure.
- justinclift 3y agoThat's in the US yeah?
- Quinzel 3y agoNah
- justinclift 3y agoWhich country?
- trimethylpurine 3y agoWhy did you guess the US first? To what do you attribute the misconception? Local news? Facebook posts? Anti American propaganda? Honestly curious.
- v-erne 3y agoThat's the most obvious pick - US medical industry is so famed for being obnoxiously expansive that even their own movies makes fun of it. Just from the top of my head I remember two scenes from two different movies - the one from Hangover II where Phil gets shot and gets treatment in Bangkok hospital ("10 dollars - how is this even possibile") and from some other comedy where one of main villans, literal rocket scientist, complains that he had no other choice because he have four children with braces and how he could possibly afford that.
- mamonster 3y ago7,500 EUR an hour. This was for one of the best tax consultants in the jurisdiction to set up a fully "tax optimized" holding structure for an extremely wealthy person, think he ended up billing like 15-20 hours just for his work, and don't know how much went to trust companies etc.
- KomoD 3y ago$1k+/hr, something along the lines of that, lawyer.
- zaphirplane 3y agoThe other side of this is billing anything for something that doesn’t do what you want. Usually migrate some council, gov department, hospital to some payroll / erp / crm for multiple years for multiple millions to something that doesn’t work. Or a lighting cable that doesn’t charge the phone, that’s almost free money
- rudolfwinestock 3y agoI know of a heart surgeon who makes $2,100 per hour.
- cpach 3y agoOmg! Do you know his utilization rate?
- rudolfwinestock 3y agoNo. He's a friend of a friend.
- catlover76 3y agoI think David Boies (lawyer) hourly rate was $1900 a couple years ago, from what I understand. Most biglaw partners in NYC bill at $1k-$1.5k per hour, I think.
- trimethylpurine 3y agoOver $8k/hr for development of highly specific middleware.
- Zetobal 3y ago12k...taxes.
- saaaaaam 3y agoWe once ended up billing what was effectively £4900 for 2 x 25 minute sessions to show a bunch of hedge fund managers how to send a tweet. That equates to £5880 an hour. If I include travel each way it was only £2261 an hour.
- mraza007 3y agoWoah, How did you even landed that gig I’m asking out of the curiosity
- saaaaaam 3y agoWe had some connections and then I had a conversation with someone at an event and they said “oh, you should come and do this thing for us”. It was meant to be a lot more involved but they kept reducing the scope but were perfectly happy with the price. I wasn’t going to query it.
- mraza007 3y agoThat’s really cool Are you still doing that or completely changed what you do now
- anomaly_ 3y ago$30k per day, AU tax barrister
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nonameiguess 3y agoNot really his fault, but Jayson Williams getting a $94 million contract and only playing 30 games before a career-ending injury is awfully expensive amortizing that over the hours he contributed in two months of play. I guess that technically isn't hourly billing. There's Bill Clinton getting $750,000 for a single speaking engagement which was roughly an hour. If that isn't the real answer, it's going to be something stupid nobody knows about like some rich asshole paying Jay-Z $5 million to give a private performance at his daughter's sweet 16 party.
- paulcole 3y agoStrasburg got 7 years and $245 million from The Nationals and I think pitched 8 games before retiring and collecting the whole bag.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- msarrel 3y agoI knew an international tax law consultant whose company charged her out at $10k/hr.
- gabrielsroka 3y ago> Salvador Dalí was cast in Alejandro Jodorowsky's adaptation of "Dune", he demanded to be paid $100,000 per hour
- quickthrower2 3y agoOK not a billing rate but Bezos has earned an average of $300k/h since birth.