Hi Paula, sorry I missed this. WOW. That’s a big pay discrepancy! Even at the $37.50 the other freelancer was able to squeeze out of her, that woman will never pay enough. That’s not a job for serious freelancers. It just can’t be. You cannot make a living at those rates.

That’s the part that really bugs me. How can some of these household-name companies and publications pay such garbage? They’re making money or they’re damn good at faking their success. No thanks. Give me the client who values my skills. I won’t waste time with the cheapskates.

I got the vibe that no matter how little someone charged per hour it would still be more than she wanted to pay. I had nothing to lose, right? So I pulled numbers from thin air – numbers that would be fair to almost any client but her. I think I said $125 or $150 per hour, with minimum of $250 per assignment. SILENCE. She was shocked.

She meekly said they pay $25/hour. I said that’s a modest hourly rate for an employee, but wouldn’t begin to cover my overheard, then launched into a mini-discourse on some of the points Jenn mentioned above.

I’ll need to keep that link to the SBA handy for the next time I encounter someone like this.

Worse yet: I later spoke with a freelancer who had worked for this woman’s PR company. That writer said the hours allotted per project were never enough. She managed to get their rate up to $37.50/hour, but said it still wasn’t worth the time and effort.

Now every time I see ads or social media posts from that company, I can only think of how unprofessionally they treat the freelancers who do much of their award-winning work.

That’s a big one. I cringe any time I see a freelancer say freelancing doesn’t have paid vacations or sick days. It’s like “you sound like an awful boss; why do you even want to work for you??” LOL It does (or should) pay for that and so much more. If it doesn’t, it’s because you made a mistake when setting your rates. Thankfully, you can always re-work that math! 🙂

I haven’t looked at it in a while, but salary.com used to be good for this too. You could look up specific job titles and locations to see not just salaries but the full cost of each employee with insurance, taxes, benefits, etc. Tempted to poke around there again soon to see if that 30-40% range still holds up.

It’s a common mistake many freelancers make, Jenn. They are charging like an employee. However, when they realize they need to save for retirement (and there’s no company match in freelancing), lose pay on sick days and vacation time, possibly fund their own healthcare (if there’s no employee-spouse/partner), they come to realize just how little they’re charging.

But they’re not doing that math and that’s a big problem. The SBA has an article up from three years ago that gives a decent overview of what employers pay. https://www.sba.gov/blog/how-much-does-employee-cost-you

A big problem I see with those struggling after years of freelancing is they never quite understood the difference between freelance pay and traditional salaries / hourly pay. Last time I dug into the details (accounting for the increased tax payments, benefits, etc.), you had to charge 30-40% more as a freelancer to truly earn an equivalent amount to what employers spend per-employee in the same role. And that still doesn’t account for earning more to cover new business expenses. It can be a shock to the system if they haven’t accounted for things like that.