How Much Am I Worth? A (Short) Guide to Freelance Rates For Students
Posted on July 1st, 2010 in Small Business | No Comments »
One of the tough things about starting up as a freelance worker is figuring out how much you’re worth. Our site gives some good starting guides for freelance design work, but, sometimes, it’s nice to know what your worth. For college students, it’s especially difficult because the data on what comparable workers charge is difficult to find.
We’ve done a little (okay, a lot) of legwork for you to try to determine some (very) rough estimates by pouring through data from multiple sources*, collecting a small amount of our own survey data, and applying several reasonable assumptions. Now, having said that, we’re going to offer two important caveats.
(1) At the end of the day, you should take a job if the employer is offering more money than the minimum amount you’d be willing to work for.
What a worker like you is “worth” (on average) is often much, much less important to a business (especially a small business) than what the business is willing or able to pay you. If a business is offering 300 dollars to do a project that would take you about 20 hours–and if you’d be willing to work 20 hours for 300 dollars–then the fact that a worker like you would normally make 30 bucks an hour should not be a deal-breaker.
(2) These numbers are extremely loose estimates
Not every college-aged freelancer is created equally. The nature of the data we analyzed is to be biased towards experienced freelancers who also happen to be in college (most of the data sets suffer a self-selection problem insofar as an experienced freelancer is more likely to use the services than a relative “newcomer”) and so these figures are ALL probably on the high-end, unless you already have 2+ years of experience in your chosen field.
On top of that, a lot of this data was gathered before the recession hit full force, which further biases the numbers upwards.
On top of THAT, the very nature of making different data sets work together (and linking them with assumptions) makes everything unreliable. Having conducted (or assisted) in a few legitimate Economics studies, we have no qualms about saying that this study would get torn apart in peer review.
Does that mean that the numbers are useless? No, they’re still something and should be considered at least a decent starting point when setting your rates. But we issue this warning as a way of saying “don’t assume that these rates are perfect” and, quite frankly “don’t expect to make this much (or, in some cases, even near this much) until you get a fair amount of experience under your belt.” Now, with those caveats out of the way, here they are (rates are hourly in USD):
Web Design: 35
Graphic Design: 42
Programmer: 42
Writer: 26
Illustrator: 35
Video Editor: 40
Photographer: 45
Again, these rates aren’t perfect. If you’re a relatively inexperienced writer and a business offers you 10 bucks an hour to write, our experience tells you you should almost certainly take it (the experience alone makes it worth it). If you’re a photographer still trying to build a portfolio and a business offers you fifteen bucks an hour, you very well may want to take that job too even if it is well below “average.”
*We don’t want to bore you with all of the sites we viewed for something unscientific, but in the interest of giving credit where it’s due, the following sites helped us in, at least, an abstract sense:
Freelanceswitch’s Freelance Statistics Report
Writing Assistance’s Rate Chart
The Bureau of Labor Statistics
