Topic: Contract Hourly Rate Question

[Bill Tillman]

I've received an offer to do contract programming with .NET and Inventor. Was wondering if anybody could clue me in as to what would be a fair hourly rate to charge for my time. It will involve a short training period to acquaint myself with their product lines but I think I can hit the ground running in a short time. Again, this will not be so much preparing drawings as it will be automating the drawing process itself using Inventor and Visual Studio or other API interface.

[ChrisCarlson]

All depends on what your time is worth to you. The average salary for a .NET developer is mid-60's, which can then be broken down to an hourly rate of about $32 / hour.  A quick review of upwork reveals the average hourly rate is about $20-40 (depending on location).

[MexicanCustard]

All depends on what your time is worth to you. The average salary for a .NET developer is mid-60's, which can then be broken down to an hourly rate of about $32 / hour.  A quick review of upwork reveals the average hourly rate is about $20-40 (depending on location).

Keep in mind that those numbers are based on an Employee rate.  From an Employer, you would be your own employer,  you have to consider all the burden, i.e. insurance, bonding, overhead. So a $40 an hour rate quickly goes to an $80-$100 rate.  Here in the tech heavy RTP I wouldn't write "Hello World" for less than $100 an hour.

I realize you wont have most of those overhead cost but consider what the price would be if they hired a firm and don't leave too much money on the table.

[hugha]

One rule of thumb is to divide a desired gross annual salary (including tax and all other outgoings) by 1000 to get $/hr.

This relies on an estimate of 1000 paid hours per annum - adjust to suit. 

Hugh

[CADbloke]

Don't short-change yourself! Watch for scope creep if they are trying to fix you to a price. My hourly rate for writing code for AutoCAD etc. is a fair way north of A$100 /hr. AutoCAD dev work is not as much a commodity as web development and general stuff so you can price yourself accordingly. The one thing your client will be looking for is ROI - they will gladly pay you one million dollars if it makes them ten million dollars, or mitigates a big risk - provided they can't shop around and get it cheaper, of course.

These may be handy ... http://stackoverflow.com/company/salary/calculator & http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2016#work-salary as well as the previous posts. Don't forget to allow for all the meta-work like invoicing. Keep an eye on your invoice frequency and their payment times as these are the main things that will affect your cash flow.