Curated by Vinod Kumar Jain & Amit Jain · All Frontier Global · free, no login
A day rate and a salary are not comparable until you put them on the same footing. Enter both sides — the salaried package including what the employer funds on top, and the contract with the costs you would carry yourself — and see them annualised side by side, plus the day rate that would exactly match the package. Pre-tax, like for like.
The salaried offer
The contract
The arithmetic, in order
Salaried package = base + bonus + base × pension % + benefits valued annually
Working days behind the salary = 260 weekdays − paid leave and holidays — the days you are actually paid to work
Salaried cost per working day = package ÷ those working days, which is the figure a day rate should be compared against
Contract gross = day rate × expected billable days · Contract net of own costs = gross − self-funded costs
Break-even day rate = (package + self-funded costs) ÷ expected billable days
Honest limits
Tax treatment differs by country and by situation, sometimes dramatically — employment versus self-employment, the entity you contract through, and local rules on deemed employment can move the answer more than the headline numbers do. Compare pre-tax likes with likes here, then talk to an accountant before deciding.
Billable days is the number that decides it. Contractors compare a day rate against a salary as if the year were full. It is not: gaps between contracts, notice periods and slow quarters are unpaid. If you are unsure, model it twice — once optimistically, once at what you actually billed last year.
This scores no judgement. The earlier version of this page promised to compare “security and 5-year trajectory”. Those are judgements, not arithmetic, and a number attached to them would be invented. Weigh them yourself: notice periods, redundancy rights, reference value, what each path teaches you.
Unpriced items sit on both sides: training, equipment, the value of a stable reference, the freedom to refuse work, sick pay, parental leave, and how each affects borrowing.
Sources
None. No salary benchmark, market day rate or tax table is embedded, fetched or implied — both sides of the comparison are figures you entered, combined by the arithmetic set out above.