| Another side comment: > This is further clarified in the rest of the comment, but I wanted to call attention to this. Be really careful with this line of thinking. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, especially given higher costs and potential downtime between contracts. I recommend billing about 30% more than you'd expect out of a salaried position. I agree with most of that. 130% of base salary is a good guideline. Employers use the same napkin math to factor in payroll taxes and benefits. As a self-employed contractor you have to pay for all of your taxes (you will get some more deductions) and your health insurance (which you can usually deduct, though that particular deduction is a political hot potato). But yes, you need to consider the additional costs of freelancing when determining your rate. As for downtime between contracts, I think it's obvious that's the freelancer's problem. You can't overcharge your customers to make up for downtime. If you establish trust and long-term relationships and get referrals you won't have a lot of downtime between projects unless you want to take time off. I had full-time hours as a freelancer just a few months after I started, entirely due to building some good relationships and getting referrals from satisfied customers. If you intend to scour the freelancer marketplaces like Upwork, you will have both downtime and significant non-billable time spent on getting projects, negotiating and going through that process. Rather than thinking about finding the next project all the time, I looked for customers that needed steady work, either system admin or programming, or both, because they couldn't afford a f/t person or couldn't find/attract/hire. Lots of smaller businesses don't have resources in-house and couldn't find and keep a competent person even if they could pay a f/t salary. You only need a few customers like that. Leave the big green-fields fixed-fee projects to the larger outsourcing firms. I found cleaning up the mess they left was itself a lucrative niche. To make a living freelancing you have to both eliminate unwanted downtime and reduce non-billable time, which mainly goes into finding the next project. I know some freelancers have effective "sales funnels" so they always have new work coming in. That can work. My approach was less sales and more building relationships that led to more work with a small number of steady customers, and solid referrals that I didn't need to find or sell myself to or bid on against other freelancers. I have written before that you know you're succeeding as a freelancer when the customer didn't consider anyone else for the job. Winning 10% of the jobs you bid on means you wasted a lot of time on jobs you didn't get. |