How much do you charge for your services, with how much experience?

12 points·bendauphinee··4 comments

I'm a developer looking for freelance work, and have been coding in PHP for almost 10 years now. What I want to know is what the rest of you either charge for your service, or would pay for an experienced developer. I'm trying to get a feel for the general market rate, to see if my $50/hr rate is too high, low, or spot on.

View on HN

Charge double the hourly wage you would work for as a full-time employee. If you're worth $25/hr as an employee, then $50/hr would be about right for freelancing.

A more in depth look: http://www.antipode.ca/2009/what-your-time-is-worth/

This helped me get an idea for what I should charge, http://freelanceswitch.com/rates/

Of course a lot of different factors go into what you feel you are worth. I found it best to be flexible with my hourly rate based on the type of work that is to be expected.

An example is if another developer comes to me looking for an extra hand on a project to knock out some code and I don't have to manage the project in anyway, I charge a lower hourly rate than if a business owner said they have an idea and wanted to start from scratch.

Thanks, that was a cool link. And it did come to about twice what I get paid hourly as an employee, so I guess that's a good heuristic.

Depends a lot on cost of living. For example, I'd never work for as low as $50/hr unless I was very desperate, but I also live in NYC. Typical contractor wages seem to be about $100/hr depending on YOE and type of work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com