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Ask HN: What is your daily rate?
This did not seem to have been done before here at HN and I think it would be useful. I propose some guidelines to replies but freestyle works great too.
I did not find anything against this in the guidelines, but if there is something wrong with the submission then apologies in advance. I believe that services companies and recruiters
make a living of hiding this information from the developer community, and often take a 20-25% cut just for sending an email with a CV, a second email to schedule an interview and sending a contract for signature over the post. This is a proposal for replies:
Top level entry: "My current daily rate is RATE / hour or day, I work in COUNTRY"
Second line : "I work as a LANGUAGE Developer/Architect, I have X years of experience and my main skills are ..."
Extra details of whether is a remote position would be interesting as well. For replies to top level entries, comments of whether the person is being lowballed or not would help, even if you prefer not to give your rate yourself.
- xpto123 12y agoI'll start: My current daily rate is 62.5 EUR/hour, and currently work in Belgium (non-remote worker, 8 years exp.). I work as Java developer/architect and my main skills are Java, JavaScript, Spring, Hibernate, GWT, Camel, SOAP/REST web services, Maven
- junopatch 12y agoMy current daily rate is $12/hour, I work in the Philippines I work as a Web Developer(ASP.NET), I have 4 years of experience and my main skills are .NET technologies
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoMy current daily rate is 150 / hour, I work on the Internet thus anywhere in the world (but my Timezone is CST/USA) I work as a Developer/Architect in whatever language, I have 30 years of experience and my main skills are drivers, OS development, embedded and networks.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- jasonkester 12y agoThis actually comes up quite often. Here's one recent instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2991350 ... and here's my explanation from that thread, on why it's a very bad idea to rely on the responses you'll get when you ask the question here: This would probably work better as a poll or an offsite, anonymous survey. I don't think you'll get very accurate results from limiting yourself to the small fraction of developers who: - don't mind disclosing their salary in public - don't have any co-workers, employers, or clients who read this site - have a single fixed rate that they charge everybody - don't plan to change their rate in the future - make enough to not feel silly disclosing their rate in public - don't make so much that they'll feel like they're just bragging I'd personally be happy to tick a box, but I'm not going to quote my rate here. EDIT: Here's a recent poll, with numbers severely skewed because the author initially capped it at $200k/year, thus losing granularity from the roughly 50% of early responders who were earning north of that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6464725
- xpto123 12y agoI know but most people on this site use an anonymous handle, which solves most if not all those points: minding disclosing in public,co-workers, employers, or clients who read this site,plan to change their rate in the future, make enough /bragging, etc. But it's true I wouldn't advise people disclosing their rate if their are not anonymous.
- xpto123 12y agoIn general I believe most people are honest and if they reply it will be the truth. In my view there is a whole industry making a huge margin at our expense because we feel uncomfortable sharing this information, I have the impression we all have to gain by sharing this more often I believe. But of course we should take the content as a grain of salt and just an indicator.
- jasonkester 12y agoThat alone will skew the results downward. Take a quick look through the "Top Commenters" list here, and you'll notice that nearly all of them use either their own name or a strong pseudonym tied to their real identity. Several of those guys are billing out at the kind of nice-to-have rates that a young dev with any sense aught to make his mission to replicate. The guys responding below with silly pseudonyms, quoting two digit hourly bill rates, don't tell anybody anything interesting. Worse, they might just convince some poor soul that "you know, maybe $65/hour isn't so bad after all", and invite him into a lifetime of being underpaid when the reality is that he could 5X-10X that if he wanted to.
- ddorian43 12y agoMy current daily rate is $15/hour, I work as remote freelancer from Albania. I work with python/flask/postgresql/mongodb and have 2 years of experience in this stack.
- pm 12y ago$750-$900 daily (don't do hourly). Developer/Designer. 8 years experience. Much ado about iOS, Cocoa, etc. Bit of web and Windows. Anything that needs to be done, really.
- fddlr 12y agoMy current daily rate is 30 EUR / day after taxes, I work in Hungary. I work as a Java junior developer, I'm an entrant in the industry, started working in february. My main skills are Hibernate, SOAP web services, Wicket, Nvidia CUDA, and a little hint of C++.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- wisienkas 12y agoMy current dayli rate is 20.15€ / Hour I work in Denmark I work as a "Student" Developer, I have programmed for 2 years My main skills are php and java. using linux platform for everything. EDIT: I'm charged about 40% of all my earnings in tax
- wsc981 12y agoMy current rate is 65 EUR / hour after taxes. I work as an iOS developer in the Netherlands. Will try to negotiate 75 EUR / hour later in the coming months.
- idlewords 12y agoI charge $1K/day, out of San Francisco. I'm not a remarkable developer, but I've been running a production website for a few years and sell my practical knowledge on how to make all the pieces (LAMP stuff) fit together under actual use.
- pw 12y agoI'm rather surprised you don't charge more. Do you do much consulting work?
- FLUX-YOU 12y ago$20/hr, Southeast USA C#/.NET Developer, 0.5 years of experience, C#, ASP.NET MVC, Front-end web development
- Bahamut 12y agoMy daily rate is currently ~$800-900 (salaried/stock options) in Silicon Valley - I have a little under 2 years of experience and am a top notch AngularJS expert & very productive frontend engineer (with a bit of full stack experience with Node.js & Java). I have been called a 10x engineer.
- supster 12y agoI'm curious, how did you become so productive within 2 years? Did you start with JS/Angular from the get go?
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- tartle 12y ago30 USD per hour, so c. 200 USD per day. Poland, but mostly remote clients. Mobile apps (crossplatform, also native iOS), occasionally some accompanying Python or PHP stuff on server.
- AgLiAn 12y ago11€/H.RO (~10€ after taxes). Back-end/Front-end senior web developer (PHP mostly).
- philangist 12y agoMy current rate is $240/day (60k/yr salaried) as a python backend engineer in NYC with 1.5 years of experience.
- majc2 12y agoI don't think your hypothesis is correct. There are sites out there that already aggregate the permanent and contract markets. (i.e. itjobswatch.co.uk) - I'm sure others exist for other territories. I know its fashionable to bash recruiters - and man do a bunch of them deserve it. But for contractors/freelancers - if you don't like selling then service companies/recruiters are your friend. Quit thinking of them as useless and start thinking about them as a sales channel who do something for you that you don't like. The key is to find the smart operators - who want to build a long term relationship (want to meet face to face etc etc) and don't talk crap. But thats about you taking the time to vet. Although I seldom need to employ because I'm doing a lot of my own sales, its a good backup and this works well in my market place (and I know of others in other markets who follow similar strategies), your mileage may vary.
- peteretep 12y agoGenerally in the UK a recruiter's fee comes from the candidate if it's a contract role, and from the employer if it's a permanent role. That's not precisely how it works, but companies accept there's a recruiter fee in the cost of a permanent hire, but will have a salary range they can offer, usually set as a policy by HR to stop wage inflation. Also the recruiter fee then is seen as a one-off cost. For contract wages, companies tend to have an all-in price they're willing to pay, which they'd happily pay the contractor directly. At that point, the recruiter is usually taking the difference between that and what they pay the contractor. In most contract positions (in the UK) via recruiters, invoicing is done via the recruiter.
- xpto123 12y agoFor me charging 25% to the contractor for the live of the contract is completely unjustifiable just for posting a job in some site and some emails and phone calls.
- HeyLaughingBoy 12y agoYou may not like it, but there's no justification needed other than both parties to the agreement being happy with it.
- anthonyby 12y agoMy current daily rate is $9/hour, I work in Indonesia I work as iOS Developer, I have 8 years of experience in IT and only 1 year in iOS Dev. But I hope my hour rate will increase soon :)
- UnethicalHacks 12y agoOn your next contract, quote your rate as $50 or $75 and see what happens. no harm in testing the waters :)
- SyneRyder 12y agoThe minimum wage in Australia is $16.87, according to the article below. I'd have ethical & possibly even legal issues if I contracted someone at less than the national minimum wage. You should definitely charge more. http://www.smh.com.au/national/minimum-wage-up-3-per-cent-rise-of-1870-a-week-20140604-39is5.html http://www.smh.com.au/national/minimum-wage-up-3-per-cent-ri...
- shortsightedsid 12y agoWhy? The minimum wage in Australia and it's legal boundaries do not apply to other countries. Plus, I don't see why there is an ethical issue in outsourcing work to another country where rates are lower. The assumption you are probably making is that $9 an hour is too low. That's right if you are in Australia, but is that low for Indonesia?
- marketingadvice 12y agoNot sure about Indonesia but in Thailand that's about average for junior - mid level. I worked in a company where they paid their head of mobile $13/hour and he was managing 3 Android devs and 3 iOS devs, each being paid between $6 and $9/hour. One of the people I worked with directly as a marketing content writer was making $3/hour.
- davewasthere 12y agoMy current daily rate is USD$640/day, I work in UK/Aus/NZ predominantly. (remote and travelling mostly) I work as a Full Stack .Net Developer/Architect for web applications, I have 16+ years of experience, with main skills in C#, MVC, jQuery, EntityFramework, SQL, Agile. Am not an exceptional developer, but I have a good working relationship with my clients to help deliver on their projects. I don't actively network (that I'm aware of) but seem to get work through personal referrals, so must be doing something right.
- peteretep 12y agoSenior Perl developers in London should be getting £350-£450/day for onsite contracting work. The market seems to support £450/day, but that needs to include recruiter cost - that is, you're unlikely to get it if you're via a recruiter. Source: I run http://perl.careers/ http://perl.careers/ and have been active in the London Perl market for the last 10 years as a dev and a recruiter.
- zimpenfish 12y agoGood to know. I shall bear this and you in mind when January rolls around...
- instakill 12y ago$80 - $150 per hour (depending on the project) capped at 10 hours per week. Live in a GMT +2 area. 4 years rails XP. Help maintain a very big legacy codebase and have built a rails backend that served an education site that got thousands of concurrent visitors at peak. Know enough devops to provision a secure server, and do deployments via capistrano or ansible.
- SyneRyder 12y agoIs that capped at 10 hours per week per client, or in total?
- jberryman 12y agoI'm also interested in what you mean by "10 hours per week" and how you present that to clients, and what sort of pushback (or not) you've experienced from clients about that.
- instakill 12y agoExactly that. I won't offer more of my leisure time to clients per week. Haven't had any upset about it yet.
- justacoward90 12y ago$1600/day, 8 hours/day, 5 days/week, remote (NO TRAVEL), USA. I write software for startups that have raised in the $5-20M range with at least $1M/year revenue. My software is mostly written in C, C++, Java, Python, Ruby, JavaScript. I began programming more than 15 years ago, although I only "officially" entered the industry during 2010. Don't set my salary as some sort of goal. Lawyers with 1/5th of my experience or talent go for 2-5x easily. Hell, I should go get a JD.
- rsobers 12y agoI think you're sorely mistaken about lawyer salary.
- WhitneyLand 12y agoYes, mistaken. 3yrs experience at $1000/hr? Not to mention the rates you see are usually firm rates not net to an individual so you have to take out other costs.
- justacoward90 12y agoBut what part of the curve are you looking at? You really think that top 0.01% of lawyers are making less than $900k/year? How good do you have to be at year 4 to hit that kind of target?
- vidarh 12y agoThe UK largest law firms, 4 of which are amongst the top 10 firms in the world, nets something like $3 million - $5 million per equity partner. Note that this is per equity partner. Many of the largest firms are increasingly choosing to award "partner" status without an equity share as they grow larger, and a non-equity partner will already earn much less. Most of the top firms will pay a maximum of about $300k/year to 4 year PQE (post qualification experience) in the UK, with UK offices of leading US firms at the top. There may be exceptions for people that make themselves really noticed and manage to land big bonuses. That's generally 6 year after leaving university because of the UK system of training contracts. 2 year PQE's in UK Magic Circle firms can earn about $100k/year. Some smaller boutique firms in niches may pay substantially more, but they will also generally not take trainees and instead hire away top talents from the leading firms. To get those kind of salaries you mention by year 4, the answer would be you'd need to bring in big enough clients that your firm is worried you'll walk.
- timwaagh 12y agomy current employer gives me 11 EUR/hr. However i charge 15 EUR/hr for smaller freelance jobs. i work as an (mainly php)associate software engineer, in the netherlands, have a half year of experience. my main skills are LAMP. I am interested in a remote positions, as well as local (but i am particular about which time of day I work).
- huskyr 12y agoEven with only six months of experience, €15 is really low for a freelance rate in the Netherlands. Remember that you usually need to reserve about half of your rate for taxes, rent, investments, etcetera, so you're actually getting paid less for freelance jobs than with your regular job. Freelance rates i've seen in the Netherlands usually range somewhere from €50 on the lower end to €120 on the higher end.
- timwaagh 12y agoYou are quite right, I should get more. By all means hire me at 50 an hour. If you'd do that, I'll go as far as to quit my safe job so all my time can go to you. You won't be disappointened ;)
- TamDenholm 12y ago£400 + VAT, UK. PHP Developer and not even a top notch one, i'm solid, but no rockstar, i am however full stack and I have other generic business skills. I also have an excellent portfolio with some very large names on them as well as almost 10 years experience doing this. You dont need to be an amazing developer to be successful, i'd actually say theres actually more value in getting complimentary skills rather than the last 10% developer skill which is what takes the longest to achieve anyway.
- nrzuk 12y agoNice, do you mind sharing which region you work in? I'm in the midlands and lucky to get £350 and have been pretty lucky to work with some huge brand names to make my portfolio shine, but clearly this isn't enough! Even with years of ZF experience I still seem to struggle to find good interesting contracts in the region.
- noelwelsh 12y agoI'm in Birmingham. There isn't much dev. work in the West Midlands in my experience. Most of our work comes from London and further afield. Rates depend on the nature of the work, but 2-4x what you quote is a reasonable range. (I work primarily with Scala. I don't do paid work 5 days a week as I have longer term projects to work on.)
- TamDenholm 12y agoYeah that is primarily London, i live in Edinburgh where theres next to no work but typically work in London. Although i've had the odd contract up here or remote for decent money. I'm flexible down to £350 a day if its an interesting project to me.
- colinbartlett 12y agoMy current daily rate is $1,200 USD/day. I work in the United States. I work as a Ruby Developer. I have 16 years experience in software development and 9 years Ruby experience.
- noelwelsh 12y agoLet me give a quick rundown of rates I've heard for contract developers in London. Please add comments if you feel this doesn't reflect the truth or you have additions to make. Do note I'm specifically referring to contract developers in London. Highest rates are working in finance. For specialised skills one can get around £1000 per day. £700 is more typical. This is in the context of Scala and "big data" developers. Outside of finance Scala developers typically get £500-600 per day. Ruby seems to be £400-500, with PHP in the region £300-400. As always, the rarer your skills the more you can charge. Assuming of course your skills are in demand. As a contract developer you're a bit of a commodity anyway. You're a "Ruby developer" or a "Scala developer" and are seen as plug-compatible with other developers in your class. If you want to charge more (or work less) stop being a contract developer. Become the go-to person in a particular niche, by publishing the best content about that niche, and people will seek you out. Then you can charge more. Oh, and you also want to work for people with money. I know from experience working within education is a great way to be poor.
- vidarh 12y agoTypical rates may be right. With more experience you can exceed it quite a bit. Fully agree with your "go-to person" comment. If you're not well known in a niche, at least network so you're well known to a reasonable group of people with hiring/contracting budgets. Even if you're not seen as a leading expert in your field, being consider a high quality person in your field that your contacts know and trust will deliver also adds quite a bit to what you can bill. I know guys that'll happily pay twice the amount to someone they know well than to some random developer that they have to take a chance on. Especially for short term contracts. "Losing" a month on a 3 month contract to an unknown quantity, for example, will very easily cause any savings to evaporate.
- flaie 12y agoMy current daily rate is 220€ / day (after taxes), I work in Luxemburg (average of 19.5 days / month). I work as a Java Developer/Architect with 7+ years of experiences, with very good skills in both backend (Java, Spring, Oracle, PostgreSQL, redis) and frontend (JS, jQuery, AngularJS, HTML5, etc..), REST/SOAP, plus some mobile stuff (Android, ionic) and all the tooling that goes with Java (maven, sbt, ...).
- robomartin 12y ago$200 to $300 per hour for software development. $300 to $500 per hour for hardware development. FEA and Simulation time charged by CPU-hour so long as they can run unattended (which is generally the case). Usual contracts are fixed price with tight specs and hourly rates kick in for changes.
- justacoward90 12y agoSo you just run ansys/comsol? (Kidding. It's more involved, I'm sure.) How did you get into that selling that service?
- robomartin 12y agoNot selling that service as an isolated item. It just happens in the context of another project. For example, we did a very advanced high power (1,500W) LED array. The project comprised mechanical, electronic design, microprocessor firmware, FPGA development and workstation software tool development. Thermal design required running piles of FEA thermal simulations over a period of about three months, probably 12 hours per day. I feel it is better to charge per CPU-hour in these cases because it gives you the flexibility, when the tools support it, to give the client the option to rent additional CPU time to accelerate development. On the FPGA front, depending on design complexity you can have simulations that run for hours before you can analyze results. Again, I don't feel it is proper to charge per man-hour when you can walk away and go do something else. You do have to charge for the processing time and use of hardware. We have 16 rack-mounted 8-core machines with tons of memory for simulation work.
- coffeeaddicted 12y agoCheck this jobboard it has numbers (daily when you select Job Type Contract): http://www.theitjobboard.co.uk/ http://www.theitjobboard.co.uk/ But unfortunately only for jobs in the UK.
- skeet 12y agoMy current daily rate is £400 / day, I work in London, UK. I work as a Node.js Developer, I have 5+ years of experience and my main skills are Node.js, Ruby on Rails, Redis, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, AngularJS, Backbone.js, jQuery, HTML5, CSS, Linux.
- fasouto 12y ago$1500/week, $400/day or $65/hour doing Django and D3 development from Spain. I charge the clients this way to incentivize larger projects and stay focused with one project at a time.
- lordbusiness 12y ago$400/day. Full time remote. (International clients). DevOps work.
- jasonswett 12y ago> I believe that services companies and recruiters make a living of hiding this information from the developer community, and often take a 20-25% cut just for sending an email with a CV, a second email to schedule an interview and sending a contract for signature over the post. Don't mix up hard work and valuable work. If a recruiter approaches you with a client for you and all you have to do is accept the job, that saves you a lot of the hassle of going out and finding a new client. If I sell you a $100 bill for $50, why should you care how much effort it took for me to get that $100 bill? Another thought: once you get above a certain rate it ceases to make sense to work with staffing agencies. Staffing agencies in my experience usually seem to be willing to pay $30-80/hr, and I'm guessing they probably bill out at about twice what they're paying you. So if they advertise $50/hr as the rate for a particular gig, they're probably billing the client $100/hr, and if your rate is $150, that's a total no-go from the start. My advice would be to not worry about what anyone else charges. There will always be people who charge more than you and less than you, and it varies wildly. There will always be businesses that will be absolutely shocked by a rate another business would find totally reasonable. The way I handle my hourly rate is to get a client at $X/hr, and once I've been working at $X/hr for a few months, set a goal to get a new client at $1.5X/hr or $2X/hr by a certain date. Then $2X becomes the new $X and I repeat the process. In this way I've tripled my rate from what it originally was. I don't share my rate publicly because I don't want a client in 2015 to say, "Well, I saw that you were charging $0.5X in 2014, so why are you asking for $X now?"
- xpto123 12y agoBut then they should charge a fixed fee, and not charge 25% for the live of the contract just for posting a job on some site, sending a few mails and doing a few phone calls. It's advised to only post rates anonymously to protect against those situations.
- mjhea0 12y agoyou should set up a google survey to capture this!
- kreinba 12y ago$45/hour when working on-site and $35 when remotely
- html5web 12y agoI'm NYC based Front-End Developer, I work for an adv. company, my daily rate is $150.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- mddw 12y ago600€ to 800€ / day (depending on conditions) + VAT, I work in France (not Paris.) Remote only. Mainly web sites, some webapps, some native apps.
- xpto123 12y agoHello, thanks for sharing that, and are there any sites/ways that you generally recommend for searching remote work? Thx
- eloycoto 12y ago€160 per day- Working from Spain mainly in Voip(7 years of experience) and full stack dev (Ansible, django, angularjs)
- artmageddon 12y agoDoes this include salaried positions? Right now the rate I'm earning is about $41/hr($328/day) in the northeast US at a small company. A few years ago I was getting $50/hr on a consulting gig, but that required a 4 hour commute(2hrs each way to NYC). I'm primarily a C# developer, but I have experience in C++, Java, SQL, and a little bit of webdev(HTML/JS). I've worked on a few mobile apps in iOS and Android(the latter with Xamarin). I'm been programming for about 15 years, and I'll be coming up on 10 years of those which have been for professional companies. I swear, reading some of these responses makes me feel very underpaid.
- dysfunction 12y agoRegular employee is different from contract, as contractor's taxes will be (much) higher and you have benefits such as health insurance included in your salary. I bet that $41/hr as a regular employee goes a lot farther than $50/hr as a contractor. Though that does still seem underpaid for 10 years' experience.
- artmageddon 12y agoYeah, all that had crossed my mind too, thanks for your comment on that. The reason I took this position was largely influenced by the fact I'd have a life. Having a commuting reduction from 2 hours each way to 20 minutes each way has made a huge difference in my quality of life. It's just that now I'd like to try to get more, and I'm in a better position to focus more time on getting myself up to a higher level(rather than fighting for a seat on mass transit).
- vidarh 12y agoI don't usually contract (well, I used to, but that was 15 years ago), but at the moment I'm doing a part-time contract at 750 pounds/day for a startup. London, UK. I do devops, development and architecture work, in Ruby, PHP, C++ and a variety of other languages, and have about 20 years of commercial experience.
- matt6545 12y agoI bill per project, a percentage of annual revenue. I work in the US. I work as a consultant for dysfunctioning \ struggling IT departments, I have 20 years of experience and my main skills are Information Risk Management, Information Security.
- marketingadvice 12y agoMy current rate is $150/hour for freelance work and $40/hour on long term contract. I work in Canada and USA mainly. I work as a marketing consultant/growth hacker, I have +6 years of experience. Hopefully in another couple years I will move into all remote contract roles so I can try out the digital nomad lifestyle in Asia.
- hmans 12y agoYes.
- tptacek 12y agoI'm not in a position to share what my rate was at Matasano, but now that I've moved on from there: my personal daily rate is $3k. I'm more likely to do work for free than to work for a single day.
- istoselidas 12y agoI am working from Greece, working remotely, my daily rate is approximately 200euro per day (before taxes), 4 days per week (it depends a bit as I am getting paid in dollars), working 9 hours per day (one hour is "paid" break). 5 years of experience as a rails developer, 8 years of experience as a web developer (full stack as I have helped on the server and our app is on angular). To be honest, I enjoy the team and the company I am working on, even if I believe I could find a better salary. Btw my salary is about 4 times more than the average salary in Greece.
- xpto123 12y agoThanks for sharing that, and concerning the remote part would you recommend any particular sites to find remote jobs? Thx
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]