Contract rates: Daily v Hourly

[ktorn]

Hi all,

Just looked at the contract rates for Java programming in London.

Can't really understand why there's such a discrepancy between the hourly (£44.59) and daily (£496) averages. According to these values a daily rate contractor would have to work 11 hours a day to earn the same as a daily rate contractor.

Are these figures, based on contract advertisements (not actual contract rates), to be trusted?

[TheFaQQer]

It's probably just that the jobs that are advertised as paying an hourly rate pay lower. Since it's just an average of two separate collections of jobs, there's no real link between the two.

I guess they could assume that a daily rate is 7.5 hours and average the two together, but that may not be the case in a number of situations.

[thunderlizard]

There are a couple of reasons.
Firstly, there are industries that just like to pay daily rates (consulting; finance) and they tend to be more demanding and pressured than others (retail, light industrials) that prefer to pay hourly.

Secondly, even within the same industry, low-responsibility code monkey jobs tend to pay hourly; jobs with more accountability, that might indeed require a couple more hours a day, tend to pay daily.