The 2025

Freelancer Rates Report

Insights into day rates and project lengths amongst the largest elite freelance community from the most-trusted global contractor sourcing and management platform.

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Overview ↓

Insights by discipline ↓

Average day rate ↓

Average contract length ↓

Methodology ↓

Contributors ↓

Overview

This report offers a comprehensive analysis of day rates across 15 key disciplines on the YunoJuno platform, providing valuable benchmarks for contractors and businesses alike. You'll find detailed insights into common day and hourly rate ranges, overall averages, and rate variations based on experience. For each discipline, we’ve also explored project durations, the most in-demand roles, and top skills across 2024.

To enrich the data, we’ve included commentary from both freelancers and clients, offering their unique perspectives on how rates are influenced by experience, skill sets, and industry trends. Additionally, we highlight how specific skills within certain disciplines can positively impact day rates, providing a deeper understanding of the value they bring to the market.

Insights by discipline

Click on the icons to the right to explore day rates insights by discipline

Average day rate

From a comprehensive dataset encompassing 62,000+ bookings, applications and approvals, spanning across various disciplines, experience levels and contract lengths, the 2024 average day rate stood at £390, reflecting a +3% year-on-year increase. The hourly rate sat on average at £49 per hour.

Notably, significant variations exist among disciplines, with the top-earning fields being Strategy (£520 average per day / £65 per hour), Market Research (£491 / £61 per hour) and Data (£469 / £59 per hour).

Top 10%

Ranking within the top 10% across industries exhibits some variability, but, on average, contracts earned approximately £708 per day (£89 per hour), marking a +9% year-on-year increase.

Average contract length

The average project length saw a slight decrease of 4%, bringing it to 23 working days in 2024—just one day shorter than the 2023 average. This expanded dataset provides enhanced depth and insight into our freelancers’ engagement. In 10 out of 15 disciplines, there was a decrease in average contract length.

In terms of project lengths, Data boasted the longest average, with freelancers being booked for just under 11 weeks (54 working days).

Top 10%

Contract lengths within the top 10% not only experienced an increase compared to the average, with an increase of +6% year-on-year. The top 10% also secured engagements that were 288% longer than the norm.

There are many benefits to bringing a freelancer onboard, the flexibility to scale your team up during peak periods or when specialist skills and experience are required. In our fast paced and ever-changing world, having an external perspective to bring new ideas and resources is invaluable when managing and delivering large scale complex projects.

Harriet Bullen

Senior Talent Manager

Methodology

Data

The data from this report is drawn from approximately 261,000+ freelance records on the YunoJuno platform from the full calendar years from 2022 – 2024. The data set includes data for bookings, applications and approvals in order to give the report additional depth and insight into all of our freelancers.

‍Note: All charts contain all records, apart from booking related charts that only contain booking data.

All client and freelancer comments and quotes are from active participants within the YunoJuno network.

Operating as a global company, our clients collaborate with contractors from over 165 countries. While our expansive reach spans the globe, for simplicity, we'll reference currency in £, reflecting our roots in London.

‍Note: All day rates were converted to GBP for consistency.

Glossary

Year-on-year growth: Calculated by the yearly growth from 2022 -2024.

‍Average day rates: Calculated by compounding roles relevant to each industry and calculating the average rate charged.

‍Average contract booking length: Calculated by compounding roles relevant to each industry and measuring the average length of each successful booking.

‍Top skills: We analysed the skills listed by freelancers on the platform, grouped them by discipline, and identified the top 10 most in-demand skills for each discipline based on frequency. From this, we highlighted the top 3 skills with the highest positive growth in day rates.