Calculating Your Freelance Hourly Rate [Infographic]
With well over 53 million freelancers in the US alone, more and more creative professionals are opting to leave the daily grind and work for themselves.
A large subset of those ditching their day jobs and launching their own self-employed careers are writers, designers, marketers, and developers – many of whom use WordPress to power their websites, attract new customers, or help others to do so. Of the top 10 million websites in the world, over 23 percent are powered by WordPress. The sheer number of WordPress-based careers is staggering, and continues to grow each day.
Whether you’re seeking to launch a new freelance career, or you’re taking a closer look at your business and how to get more out of it, setting your hourly rate is a huge undertaking. You want to stay competitive, but you can’t make it in the long run by being the cheapest in the industry, and you can’t be the most expensive without have the experience and the portfolio to justify the premium price. You should focus on providing more value to your clients and making your high hourly rate worthwhile for each job that you land. Regardless, you need to start somewhere.
To help you do exactly that, our friends at CreativeLive have created this handy infographic to help you figure out exactly how to calculate your ideal freelance hourly rate.
Click here to view the original post on CreativeLive.
And for more on freelancing, check out WP Engine’s special report “The Freelance Economy and Job Market.”
Channel Marketing Lead: Money & Life at CreativeLive. Writer at ryrob.com where I teach entrepreneurs how to start a business while working full-time.
Thank you Ryan, for this insight.
Thanks, Lance! I even learned a thing or two while I was creating this one. It’s surprising how complicated something seemingly this simply, can actually turn out to be. My first freelance hourly rate was $35/hr because that was the equivalent to what I was making at my full-time job at the time. Boy, was I surprised when things didn’t add up at the end of my first year freelancing..
This is excellent, maybe the best of these I’ve seen in years.
The funny thing for me is, I have been charging exactly $70/hour for 12 years now!
It’s annoying that so many people try to equate a freelancer’s hourly fee with an employee’s hourly pay, when they’re completely different.
Thank you, Patty! I completely agree. Anyone that’s actively hired freelancers for their business should really have an understanding of this equation too.. it’ll also help them understand all the costs they’re saving with their business by not hiring someone full-time.
This is an excellent way to calculate hourly rates. Thank You !