[MortenK]

High-end contracting within not-so-common software and / or specific business domains.

The contracts are often very long (some many years) and the rates are sufficiently high to get you to 250K and beyond, even after accounting for sickdays, medical insurance, pension, vacation etc.

You can get there through experience in specific technologies like SAS CRM, SAP, Salesforce etc, meaning tech's that are not so common without necessarily being completely niche. You can also get there as a generalist developer with exceptional experience in a business domain like automotive, finance, retail or whatever.

The rates can get extreme when the developer is specialized in both a specific technology and business domain.

A specialist in marketing automation + finance for example or datawarehousing + retail etc.