for PHP coding the years matter and I believe that if you are good at php then you are good at whatever php framework, but you are not answering the question
And for taxes related comment that will bring us to 19eur/hour for junior and 33 eur / hour ?
Is that what you are saying ?
So what is this area thing that modifies your salaries guys ?
if you live here or there you don t get the same salary, I guess it is like in france, if you are in paris you get the biggest salary but not in smaller cities. is that the same ?
At my level, I cannot calculate the rate as deep as region or cities, I need to define that on a country level. What would be the bases in your point of views ?
First: Because I have zero trust in what BIZ as a company/magazine does and I know about other surveys like this that were presented wrong by them. But, OK, let’s say I have my personal issues with this, so ignore this.
Second: The data they provide is from a HR agency, so this means that any number they provide is from very large companies that use these kind of services. Extrapolating this to “90%” of the IT employees is… I can’t find any other word than stupid.
Third: If the salaries provided there are “the norm”, I can’t see why they say „Există atracție în continuare din partea companiilor din străinătate să vină în România, grație salariilor încă mici comparativ cu media europeană așa că angajații din IT se vor bucura și de acum încolo de statutul de privilegiați”. What is the EU median wage for the same positions? A developer that earns 2500 euro net in Romania means that he gets almost 4500 gross per month, so 54k gross per year. What are the salaries in western countries? I was looking at US, for example, and 80k USD gross for a non-gigantic-city seems like the normal rate, so how are romanians that cheap at this moment?
I left salary position in France in 2011 so I m not sure but the numbers shown in france on a median salaries for median companies in paris seems fair so I guessed romania calculation was fair too.
However this rate are salary based and when you go for freelance it can skyrock BUT.
As fair as I know french market, someone will ask for 75 euros / hour and get 30 euros / hour as the market is based on offer and demand. There s a huge amount of freelancers but a few who can get high salary so the rest is fighting against each others to get clients and this bring cost down.
So when I read that in romania, developers are asking for 30 eur / hour, I have some reserve on that rate.
I m not saying it is not the correct rate, I just wonder because I don t have the answer how a french guy and a romonian gue could get the same salary when life in france is more expensive.
And here I am talking with you guy to find out the answers
Am I right to think that mixing the data from Biz and cashit.ro should give me a better understanding of the rate reality of romania ?
Hi @tabacitu, someone advised me to ask your point of view on average rate for junior php/laravel/symfony developer (2 years experience) and a senior same field (10 years of experience) as a freelancer in romania.
What do you think ?
(tl;dr at the end)
As an average salary, 10-15€/h is a fair price. Basically this means about 800-1200€/mo salary (after taxes), which is pretty much in the range of salary of the most developers I personally know, either junior or medium.
Now, let’s talk about what you’ve asked: freelancer developer.
As a freelancer, you’ll have to deal with a lot more compared as being an employee (e.g. taxes, feast-famine cycle) so it’s less likely you’ll find a fairly decent developer at a hourly rate of 10-15€. Probably you’ll find either a student or an employee of another company that can only work in his/her spare time (hence you’ll get a couple of hours per day if you’re lucky).
Besides that, as a freelancer, the developer is not stuck on local market, so is even less likely to have a reasonable accurate „romanian developer hourly rate”.
Strictly speaking of my experience, you don’t really want a junior freelancer. Sure, you’ll save some bucks in the begining, but in the long term? Probably it’s a bad idea.
Also, most romanian developers I talked/worked with asked 20€+/h for WordPress related tasks, which they are usually low in complexity.
TL;DR: 10-15€/h is fair as a junior employee. Most likely is not fair for a freelancer.
Thanks @iamntz,
Appreciate this.
Let s assume there is some sort of correlation between salary rate and freelancers rate.
What would be a proper coefficient to apply to salary rate to get junior freelancers rate ?
is it like 10 * 1.3 ? so it would give us a 13 to 19.5 euros / hours ?
What should I expect from a senior position like 10 years old as a salary rate (I still need to read the two articles from Biz and cashit.ro for my own calculation) ?
Now, my busness has 2 sides, one is client oriented and the other is freelancers oriented.
What I m trying to achieve here is to answer one simple question : How do you become a freelancer when you have no network and no money ?
The actual answer is you can not, and that s where my business come along.
I want to be able to provide constant work on a flexible calendar to people who want to embrace this style of life or have no choice.
So I don t mind working with junior as long as I have the proper rate and that is the same to senior.
Because at the end these profiles will get work from my company and to be sustainable I need to find the Fair2Win rate for everybody as I would not a partner (freelancer) to be pissed of to work with davask my company and on the other side I would not like to ripped of the clients because they don t get the proper rate.
1.5x, because they pay taxes.
Wrong. With freelance marketplaces you now can get clients very easy if you have a bit of client service / sales experience.
As long as he delivers quality, which is very unlikely for a junior, maybe even impossible if he doesn’t have someone to guide him.
not wrong, if you leave your salaried work tomorrow and rely on market place only : good luck for your living. for the beginning you are going to have tough time and it will get better, if you are more than a freelancer, if you are able to market yourself and if you are very good at what you do
That’s where my company comes along too.
I m not thinking my partnership with my vendors as a classic vendor/client relationship, I think about it as a common company where everybody is looking to Win by helping each others and in my case the junior would be guided by my own company (don t ask me the details this is the goal)
That’s why you shouldn’t quit your job if you don’t already have many projects from the marketplace. After all, you will not guarantee projects to the people that you will work with, right?
My goal is to be able to say : hello Bogdan, you want to become freelancer, good news, let s do 1 project first together and if everything goes well I have 20 hours/month on a 6 month period that could fits your profile.
And to your first comment, sometimes people have no choice and needs to go on freelance with no background, no experience or are very bad at negotiating or marketing themself
I m not here to work with people who don t need me
that is so untrue in this field of work.
the price of work / the hourly rate is where the freelancer meets the client and there are many factors in it (the factors are different for every person).
anyway, most of the time you get what you pay for (low rates means less skilled workers), but there are exceptions.
you should focus on how to get what you need (most of the time you need the job done in a given time and budget) rather than focus on low rates.
that s a point of view, I do things differently.
I m not focusing on low rate I m focusing on fair rate for sustainable partnership.
But when I see reactions I wonder, maybe people are not ready to embrace my vision. Maybe people just want to go to market place and fight for themself individually instead of developing a coherent workforce with people defending their rights.
Maybe I m too much of an utopist.
As I said, if i was looking for lower rates, I will not be discussing here and I would be bargaining with developers on some plateform to reach the most needy guy who is trying to make a living based on freelancing.
I don t work/think/live like that.
as i said, there are many factors to consider in the rate.
the team / the workforce / etc… may count for something (from worker point of view), but you have to give a lot for the team / workforce to actually work.
freelancers are not quite the best team players.
if i understand correctly your vision, you want the benefits of having employees with the freedom of having freelancers on your payroll. i don’t thing you will easily find what you are looking for.
That s interesting : you see me as willing to get freelancers as employees and I see freelancers getting fixed number of hours per trimester/semester/year and keeping the calendar freedom.
Two different points
Just for your information, I m a freelancer a nomad freelancer exactly + a business owner who try to make a living by providing good services to his clients and constant work to his partners
that’s the definition of an employee 
(except some other benefits for the employee: vacantion time, some laws to protect him, etc).
as am i (just not quite nomad)
Based on cashit and biz for a Software developer freelancer in Romania paying his business (25%) and personal taxes (21%) my analysis so far his :
this is an average the min max for junior are 10 to 21 and for senior 17 to 30.
Now a little angel gave me a little bit more insights from what looks like salaries in your country and I have now a second range which is much closer to my intial calculation where a junior could get at low as 6 eur/hour and a senior 10 years 23 eur / hour.
What do you think ?