Quarterly Desk

Proprietary data · collecting now

Freelance Rate Benchmark

Rate surveys in this field are either ancient, tiny, or run by someone selling you something. This one is none of those, and it is open about what it does not yet know.

What do freelancers actually charge?

Nobody publishes this honestly, so we are collecting it. Six questions, no email, no name, no exact figures — everything is banded so an answer cannot be traced back to a person.

What is stored: your discipline, rate band, experience band, country, how you charge, and your client type. What is not: your name, email, IP address, city, or the exact number you typed — because you never typed one.

Why this does not show you results yet

Because there are none. The survey opened before the results page exists, deliberately: a dataset takes months to become worth reading, and the only way to have one in six months is to start collecting now.

The alternative — seeding the table so the first chart looks populated — is the one thing we will not do. A single invented row would make every figure that follows unverifiable, and the entire value of this dataset is that it is real. An empty chart is honest. A fabricated one is worthless and would eventually be found out.

When a segment gets published

At 30 responses. Below that, a percentile is noise wearing a number's clothes — and it is also close enough to identify the handful of people in it. Segments are discipline, country and experience band together.

Figures are published as 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles with the response count and the date attached, so anyone quoting them can see exactly what they rest on.

What is stored, exactly

Six banded answers and a date. There is no email column, no IP column and no session identifier in the table — not as a policy, but as a fact about its structure. Rate and experience are collected as bands rather than exact figures, because "$85–100/hr" cannot be matched back to a person the way "$92.50" can, and the aggregate is just as useful either way.

Full detail on the privacy page.

What it will be used for

A quarterly published snapshot, dated and citable. It feeds the calculators with a percentile so you can see where your rate sits, and it is the one thing on this site that is not available anywhere else.