How this calculator works
Independent contractors price their work in a vacuum. Job boards publish corporate salaries, not consultant rates; recruiters lowball; senior engineers underprice themselves and stay there for years because no one tells them otherwise. This calculator takes four signals — your role, your metro, your years of experience, and your current rate (if you have one) — and tells you where you fall in the competitive range for similar work.
Competitive hourly range
We start with the median annual salary for your job title from BLS O*NET wage data, apply a local cost-of-living multiplier for your metro, convert to an hourly rate by dividing by 2,080 (the standard full-time-equivalent), and build a 25th-to-75th percentile range around the median. Roles not in the lookup table fall back to a sensible default with an explicit note in the results so you know the answer is best-effort. If your years of experience exceed twenty, the upper bound expands to reflect the senior premium most contracts honor.
W2 salary equivalent
If a client offered you a W2 role instead, your headline number would be lower for the same lifestyle. Employers pay payroll tax on top of your salary (the FICA half you don't see when you're self-employed is real money), and benefits — health insurance, paid time off, retirement match — usually run another $300-500 a month. The W2-equivalent figure rolls those costs in so you can compare apples to apples. For "W2 converting to contract" the burden is excluded (you already have the benefits); for "International Remote" it's higher because cross-border employer costs run heavier.
Market position
If you entered a current rate, we slot it into one of five bands — Below Market, Below Average, At Market, Above Average, or Premium — by where it falls in the percentile range. The boundaries are conservative on the high side (a tie sorts down, not up) so the read is honest rather than flattering.
Recommended rate
Our recommendation starts at the midpoint of the competitive range and adjusts for experience: a small discount for newer contractors (under two years), neutral in the three-to-five sweet spot, a seven-percent premium between six and ten years, and fifteen percent above that. If you already entered a current rate that beats the recommendation, we don't tell you to drop — the assumption is that you know your client better than we do.
Data sources and limits
Salaries: BLS O*NET wage tables, May 2023 release (stubbed for
roughly a dozen common contracting roles; the broader table is a
forthcoming dataset). Cost-of-living: averaged metro indices from
public CCER and MIT Living Wage data (also stubbed for the top
twenty US metros). If your role or metro isn't found, you'll see
a "using national average" note in the results. The math
contract this tool implements is documented in the build brief
at generated/independent-contractor-rate-validation-tool/ICG_build.md.
What the paid tier adds
For $0.99 the upgrade adds full BLS benefit cost modeling for your specific state, a negotiation script tuned to your market-position band, a rate-card PDF formatted for clients, and a profit-margin calculator that accounts for unbillable time. Free tier is the rate validation; paid tier is the action plan that comes with it.