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A rule of thumb I've used is to take your expected annual salary and divide by 1,000 to get the hourly rate you should charge.
This is double the hourly rate you would make at the salaried role, but accounts for the higher taxes you pay, higher expenses, the lack of benefits (including PTO), and the fact that you're not guaranteed 40 hours of work every week.
They may ask you to negotiate down from that number, but that's a good position to be in for you. Just bear in mind that if you negotiate down by say, 30%, you're probably costing them less per hour than a full-timer at your target salary.
Yep, my rate would be $75-$100/hr
Also depends on how you view the work. If asking for more loses you the contract, then $65 isn’t chump change. Another negotiation lever is a guaranteed 60 hours a month or the hourly jumps to $85 an hour.
Assuming you’re in the US, your net after self-employment taxes will be around $55/hour. That sounds reasonable if you translate it to a full-time salary equivalent (114k), but as a contractor, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll make that much even if you have other anchor clients due to unpaid time off. In general, independent contractors in tech tend to charge approximately twice the hourly rate for a W-2 employee to work on a 1099 due to taxes, lack of benefits, no job security, etc. So if they would need to pay a hypothetical FTE the equivalent of $50/hr for this work, your rate should be closer to $100/hr.
I would look into charging per project, not per hour.