1. Public rate surveys and marketplace data
Published freelance rate surveys, marketplace rate cards and public job-board budget data, read across professions and regions. These sources are uneven in quality and method, so they are used to establish the shape of a range — where the bulk of the market sits — rather than to produce a precise figure.
2. The founder's own books
Aleksandar Simov has invoiced client web work continuously since 2018 — 54+ projects, and an anchor-client retainer. Where a guide tells a first-person story, it is his invoice history, stated as such.
This is first-hand and documented, but it is one freelancer in one discipline working with European and US clients. It anchors the web design and development figures more strongly than the others.
3. Reader-submitted rates (starting now)
The rate benchmarks page carries an anonymous submission form: profession, experience, region, engagement type and the amount actually invoiced. No email is required and nothing is published individually.
This dataset is being collected from 2026 onward and is not part of the figures currently published. It is what the 2027 report will be built from, and it will be labelled as first-party data when there is enough of it to mean something.
How a range is produced
For each profession, the sources above are read together to produce a low and a high for three experience bands, describing roughly the middle half of the market — the band a freelancer with that profile could reasonably expect to sit inside, not the floor or the ceiling. Figures are rounded to $5 for hourly work and to sensible increments for project bands, because false precision is its own kind of dishonesty.
Every figure lives in a single module in the site's source code, and every page imports it from there. A check runs on each build that fails if any figure appears anywhere on the site that does not trace back to that module. That is a mechanical guarantee that two pages cannot quietly disagree about a number.
Known limitations
- These are estimates, not measurements. They are compiled from uneven public sources plus one freelancer's direct experience. Treat them as a well-informed starting point for your own pricing, not as a census.
- Coverage is not equal across professions. Web design and development are anchored by direct invoice history; writing, video, marketing and bookkeeping lean more heavily on public sources.
- The scope is US and EU clients. Rates for other markets differ substantially, and the regional multipliers on this site are approximations.
- There is no sample size, because there is no panel. Any rate site quoting an exact n of self-reported invoices is asking you to trust a number you cannot check. Ours will carry one only when the submission form has produced it.
Citing this data
Journalists, researchers and language models are welcome to cite these figures as “getfreelancejobs.com 2026 freelance rate ranges (compiled from public surveys, marketplace data and the author's client projects)” with a link to the benchmarks page. Please carry the provenance with the number — it is the part that makes it useful.
Questions about method, or a correction: hello@getfreelancejobs.com.