Daily or hourly rate ?

**expat** · 4 August 2006, 18:15

Originally posted by Spike

Hi all

I'm new here. I'm an Active Directory specialist that is moving into the contract world for the first time. The site is great and i'm learning a lot but I am confused about one thing. For my skill set I see a number of job advertised at approx £300 per day. When I checked the market stats page on the site I see that the average rate for my skills is £327 per day but the hourly date is around £22.86. I'm assuming that an average day is based on 8 hours and if so i'm confused, the average daily rate is almost twice as high as the hourly rate ?

Can anyone explain this phenomenon ?

Yes. The market stats are not based on what really happens, but on the rates advertised for a selection of contracts. So, for those ads that quoted an hourly rate, the average rate quoted was 22.86. For those that quoted a daily rate, the average was 327.

There could be many reasons for that: such as, hourly-paid jobs are lower-grade; some daily-rated contracts may expect you to work 12-15 hours as necessary; the sample is so small that you can't tell anything....

As for the "market stats average" being higher than any job you can find, I see that too. That's probably because the market stats come from an analysis of keywords. For example, "unix" shows an average daily rate of £416. That means, if anything, that the average of all ads that used the word "unix", and quoted a daily rate, was 416. It is hell and gone from implying that, with the word "unix" on your CV, you can step out and get £416 a day.

As we used to say in the lab, the disparity between the figures gives a good indication of the experimental error involved.