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Comment by davedx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Are UK rates really that much lower than Dutch (NL) rates? In my experience (both as a freelancer and in hiring freelancers) is that in all areas of web development and design hourly rates start at €40 for wordpress stuff (charging less would be considered amateur range) up to €120 for really specific skills with most developers and designers charging around €60-€80.

Even with these rates it's pretty damn hard to find decent Python/PHP/Ruby or front-end devs. Designers (and Flash devs) are a bit easier to find as we are not lacking design/art schools.

Could it be there are simply more technically schooled people in the UK driving down prices?

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.

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.

Perhaps the rates are higher in the Netherlands because taxes are much higher compared to the UK. Even for people who work full time and benefit from the expat discount, it's still quite a bit more. So there's a higher cost of living.

I'd say this is not the case. For example, taxes in Belgium are higher than the UK and average rates are lower than the UK.

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