Freelance rates in Abq are 18% below the national average and I only found out from a PDF | Abq Local Freelancers - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals
Freelance rates in Abq are 18% below the national average and I only found out from a PDF
I was poking around for rate benchmarks last week and landed on a 2024 report from a freelance group that broke things down by metro. Turns out Albuquerque freelancers bill about 18% less per hour than the national average, which was way more than I expected. I checked it against what three people in my co-working spot charge here and honestly the numbers lined up pretty close. Now I can't tell if I should raise my rates and risk losing local gigs or just start hunting for remote work. Has anyone here actually bumped their rate above the local norm and kept their Abq customers?
Something worth looking at is who your local clients actually are. If they're mostly small shops and solo folks who are also feeling the squeeze, then yeah, the low rates here probably aren't going anywhere and raising them means losing gigs. But if a chunk of your Abq clients are bigger companies or agencies who bill their own customers at normal rates, they can pay more, they just don't because nobody's making them. That's a totally different situation and those are the ones you can test a higher number on. Have you broken your client list down like that yet? Might tell you more than the report does.