

Freelance Rates Survey, 2011 (UK) - cwan
http://cole007.net/blog/86/freelance-rates-survey-2011

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dotBen
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
£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-opportun...](http://www.red-gate.com/our-
company/careers/current-opportunities/graduate-software-engineer)

~~~
dotBen
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 :/

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davedx
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
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
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.

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omouse
If you're a Canadian, you can join the Canadian Freelance Union:
<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
;)

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lazy_b
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

      >> 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).

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dangravell
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...](http://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/contract.aspx?page=1&sortby=0&orderby=0&q=&id=900&lid=2618)
to help work out a rate.

There seems quite a difference between hourly and daily rate.

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jasonkester
_"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
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.

~~~
jasonkester
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.

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10101010010012
This seems low, speaking as a UK dev. It massively depends on the work you're
actually doing though.

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

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

~~~
kingofspain
In my experience it depends on the work. For consulting jobs where you go sit
in a bank or whatever and bash out code onsite all day, £300 is low. But for
freelance work, remote work, it's much harder to find anyone who will pay
£300, let alone higher. It's not impossible but there's much more of a race to
the bottom in the latter jobs than there is in the former.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
To give a data point: I'm doing only remote work (except 12 days on site this
year) and I'm really, really north £300 (my usual daily rate is 900€).

(see <http://www.logeek.fr/> if you're curious about the kind of work I do)

My opinion is that it's not a matter of money, but rather a matter of finding
companies that work remotely and do it well.

