Be Excellent To Each Other

I will shortly be leaving my current job, however they still wish to retain my services on a consultancy basis. Assuming I'm doing PHP/mySQL development work in a medical research environment, what would you say a reasonable hourly rate would be? Standard balance of not taking the piss while not underselling myself (and making working in my spare time worthwhile).

My current proposal is termed as 16 hours a month, charged at £XXX/hour. Thoughts?

£180

Do you ever do client work that they charge for?

I would suggest it depends what they pay you now. Work out an approximate current hourly rate, and then double it.

I thought you were supposed to quadruple it?

Malc

Nope, all internal.

Due to the way funding works here (stupidly), my systems support about half a dozen research groups, but they have no central fund for a long-term permenant role. By contracting they can 'top-slice' their individual budgets and pay far more for far less, because they're stupid.

It's public sector, so they haven't got any money (any more) to piss up the wall, and while it's an absolute tactic the centre manager has been very cagey about if they can afford anything at all. My instinct was to value my time at £30/hour, making it £480 a month. Anything less than that and I'd be happy to tell them to struggle on without me. Trouble is I don't know if £30 is totally underselling.

30 is what I was going to suggest. It's not taking the piss anyway.
There may well be haggling though so start higher.

Yeah, I reckon £30/h is underselling. I think our company charges out developer time at about £1000 a day to our clients, and I think thats considered as pretty reasonable - it's worth our while as we can use most of that developed stuff for other people, but for work that is really for only one client, it doesn't make us much of a profit ( after on-costs and oppourtunity costs and so on ).

It's next to impossible for us to say if that's underselling or not - but £30 does sound low.

Like others have said, work out your hourly wage and quadruple it.

£30 sounds incredibly cheap for a developer who they have no concerns about and will obviously be able to "hit the ground running", so to speak.
Regardless of how much money the public sector has and how much they can afford, if they went to the open marketplace and wanted a person from a consultancy, they would be paying at the very very least £600-800 a day. If they went to the contractor market I'm less up on those prices, but I would expect no cheaper than £350-400 a day?

If I was you, I would tell them £50 an hour.

Well, at least I know I'm not taking the piss and if they recoil in horror I can fold my arms and say 'meh'.

Cheers fellas.

If they're paying you in porn, they might want to pay you by the minute.

Ask for £300 so you can pay for the bumper.

Skyrim owes me well over a grand.

There are a number of job salary/rate calculators that show you the current rates for advertised roles. This one isn't too bad.

http://www.contractoruk.com/market_rates/

What would you charge Plisk?

Btw thanks, I was nosing at that very site earlier. Looks like £20/hour for waged, and £35ish for contracting. £240 at a daily rate though seems bargainous by the average.

Time to do Cv. If those rates are true £49 PH

I would charge them the average outside London rate assuming you aren't in the Big Smoke. First off, it establishes you as credible in the market. Second, that is what you would be getting elsewhere. Third, it is only 16 hrs/month of work.

If you want to drop 10% as a favour to them as a previous employer, then that is up to you.

Remember, you are only asking what it would cost, on average, to get someone else in. You are a known quantity to them, they know you work well with them and there is no bedding in period. These are huge advantages.

All excellent points. Cheers

For what I do, they seem slightly low.

However, I get a lot of enquiries for roles that aren't advertised, and a fair few that are advertised are because they can't fill them. Obviously you have to be flexible in this game, but I've been rung up about jobs that are 20% less than that average. The recruiters know they can't fill them but they have to do what they can.

If you are paye you will pay a big chunk in tax

FWIW, most of the freelance devs I know charge at least £40/hr, so that should be the minimum you go for. Quite a few end up in the £400–£500 per day range.

In the South I pay Desktop Support guys £20-£25 ph

Don't really have a profile for what you are offering, but if you want an idea go to Jobserve and see if you can find a profile that is close to yours.

That way you can offer a market rate for yourself and not sell yourself cheap.

Remember by using you this company are getting somebody who aready understands the people and systems, that also has a market value!