It’s not roughly equal at all. Let’s round up and say the employer pays 10% and the employee pays 10%. For self employment that goes to 20% But, in the US, y

It’s not roughly equal at all. Let’s round up and say the employer pays 10% and the employee pays 10%. For self employment that goes to 20% But, in the US, you can pay yourself whatever wages you want and take the rest as a distribution which is not subject to employment taxes. So if you make 100K as an employee, then quit to freelance, you just pay yourself 40K in wages (or whatever you deem a reasonable salary) take the rest as a distribution and come out ahead. The other comments about PTO and employees costing more are similarly “wrong” in that there’s a simple bottom line and the other costs beyond wages simply aren’t that significant, especially at the higher end. Insurance costs don’t scale with wages. 401k is easily obtained inexpensively as a freelancer, etc. Time off is easily handled with monthly or weekly rates instead of hourly. All in all it simply comes down to if you can convince someone with a budget to get a SOW signed and a PO issued. Everything else is just fungible numbers business move around on a PnL report. The real bottom line is they offered to pay you 30 EUR and you accepted it. The freelancers did not.