
Ask HN: What is your daily rate? - xpto123
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.<p>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:<p>Top level entry: &quot;My current daily rate is RATE &#x2F; hour or day, I work in COUNTRY&quot;<p>Second line : &quot;I work as a LANGUAGE Developer&#x2F;Architect, I have X years of experience and my main skills are ...&quot;<p>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.
======
jasonkester
This 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
I 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.

~~~
jasonkester
That 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.

~~~
xpto123
Just to understand, why do you believe using an anonymous handle skews the
results downward? Most persons use anonymous handles online, except on places
like facebook its a generalized practice. I personally don't see the
correlation between those two things.

The name of the site is Hacker News, so I would expect a lot of people here to
be security aware and in general use pseudonyms anyway.

~~~
thedufer
I believe the argument is that most top commenters (which I suspect correlates
quite well with high rates) are not pseudonymous, and thus unlikely to
respond. See: patio11, tptacek, etc.

~~~
patio11
FWIW: I bet you that there exist people with 0 < n < 100 HN karma who have
weekly rates which beat Thomas' and my peak career rates, combined.

~~~
thedufer
Oh, I don't doubt it. Outliers among outliers and all that.

I didn't mean to pick you two out as particularly high earners among the top
HN users, FTR. You're just the two username/real name pairs I can come up with
off the top of my head.

------
noelwelsh
Let 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
Typical 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.

------
justacoward90
$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
I think you're sorely mistaken about lawyer salary.

~~~
WhitneyLand
Yes, 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
But 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
The 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.

------
tptacek
I'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.

------
anthonyby
My 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 :)

~~~
SyneRyder
The 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-
ri...](http://www.smh.com.au/national/minimum-wage-up-3-per-cent-rise-
of-1870-a-week-20140604-39is5.html)

~~~
shortsightedsid
Why? 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
Not 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.

------
instakill
$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
Is that capped at 10 hours per week per client, or in total?

~~~
instakill
Total. I like my free time.

~~~
SyneRyder
That's awesome. Love that approach.

------
jasonswett
> 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
But 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.

------
majc2
I 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.

~~~
xpto123
For 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.

~~~
majc2
The contractor is not really being charged 25%. Sure the agency, might end up
with 25% (but I suspect its less).

The recruitment agency gets money, because they've taken the time to build a
relationship/do sales stuff/navigate a procurement department/convincing
someone they can solve the clients problem (I need more resource!).

~~~
xpto123
Navigating procurement departments does not add any value to anything.

In the age of the internet, if a company needs some resources then the hiring
manager could place the job description directly in some website instead of
asking a recruiter to do it for him.

He can filter out CVs much more effectively by keywords using some GUI rather
asking a recruiter to ask for the keywords on the phone.

He sends a mail/phones the candidate for an interview, how hard could it be?
He needs to interview the candidate anyway.

I don't see how a few hours of administrative work for a hiring manager could
justify the fortune that the procurement department will spend with the margin
payed to the intermediary.

------
robomartin
$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
So you just run ansys/comsol? (Kidding. It's more involved, I'm sure.) How did
you get into that selling that service?

~~~
robomartin
Not 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.

------
timwaagh
my 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
Even 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
You 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 ;)

------
istoselidas
I 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
Thanks for sharing that, and concerning the remote part would you recommend
any particular sites to find remote jobs? Thx

------
davewasthere
My 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.

~~~
Mandatum
Funny, C# has been around 12 years. EF 6 years. jQuery 8 years.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say you've been a developer and architect for
16 years, with 12 years experience in .NET?

------
TamDenholm
£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
Nice, 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
I'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.)

------
junopatch
My 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

------
ddorian43
My 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.

------
wisienkas
My 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

------
artmageddon
Does 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
Regular 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
Yeah, 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).

------
pm
$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.

------
peteretep
Senior 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
Good to know. I shall bear this and you in mind when January rolls around...

------
flaie
My 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,
...).

------
mddw
600€ to 800€ / day (depending on conditions) + VAT, I work in France (not
Paris.) Remote only.

Mainly web sites, some webapps, some native apps.

~~~
xpto123
Hello, thanks for sharing that, and are there any sites/ways that you
generally recommend for searching remote work? Thx

------
philangist
My current rate is $240/day (60k/yr salaried) as a python backend engineer in
NYC with 1.5 years of experience.

------
vidarh
I 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.

------
marketingadvice
My 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.

------
Bahamut
My 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
I'm curious, how did you become so productive within 2 years? Did you start
with JS/Angular from the get go?

------
xpto123
I'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

~~~
stinos
Is that before or after taxes? As a contractor?

~~~
xpto123
This is before taxes, TVA excluded, as a contractor.

------
JoeAltmaier
My 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.

------
fddlr
My 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++.

------
idlewords
I 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
I'm rather surprised you don't charge more. Do you do much consulting work?

------
skeet
My 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.

------
matt6545
I 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.

------
coffeeaddicted
Check 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.

------
fasouto
$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.

------
tartle
30 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.

------
wsc981
My 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.

------
colinbartlett
My 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.

------
eloycoto
€160 per day- Working from Spain mainly in Voip(7 years of experience) and
full stack dev (Ansible, django, angularjs)

------
FLUX-YOU
$20/hr, Southeast USA

C#/.NET Developer, 0.5 years of experience, C#, ASP.NET MVC, Front-end web
development

------
AgLiAn
11€/H.RO (~10€ after taxes). Back-end/Front-end senior web developer (PHP
mostly).

------
html5web
I'm NYC based Front-End Developer, I work for an adv. company, my daily rate
is $150.

------
lordbusiness
$400/day. Full time remote. (International clients). DevOps work.

------
kreinba
$45/hour when working on-site and $35 when remotely

------
mjhea0
you should set up a google survey to capture this!

------
hmans
Yes.

