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I've been contracting for just over a year in London as a JS dev. £500 is a good day rate, I've seen as low as £250 advertised. It also varies a little, for example front-end gigs using React will generally pay better than Vue (a shame for me in particular as I prefer Vue).

With the IR35 changes I've been looking at switching back to full-time, but the salary ranges are just so low in comparison, it's quite disheartening really. Most comparable full-time positions offer about a third of what I make contracting.

I also expected contractors to be more highly skilled, but in my experience it's almost the opposite. I recently worked with a devops contractor earning probably around £100k who had set the organisation wide SSO administrator password to "Password1".

If I didn't have so many commitments in the UK I would seriously consider trying to move to the US. The market here seems completely bizarre.