[LRUG] The state of contracting market survey

[Tadas]

Happy Monday LRUG,

Sun's out, 2025 contracting market survey results are out!

A HUGE thank you to everyone who's responded! 160+ people from UK IT
Contractors discord <https://discord.gg/uteWnwP9CU>, LRUG
and /r/ContractorUK.

You can find the summary, as well as links to raw data on GitHub here:
https://github.com/tadast/switching-to-contracting-uk/blob/master/surveys/2025.md


Feel free to analyze, interpret and discuss the results. My takeaway is
that it's looking rather gloomy, and the consensus seems to be IR35 reform
and interest rates are to blame (no surprise here). But most of the
contractors are determined to continue, despite it being harder than
before, and it's not because of the money contracting brings - I was
pleased to see most would still choose an outside IR35 contract over the
same take-home pay in a permanent role - seems like a very conscious
lifestyle choice rather than something influenced by financials.

If you want to benchmark how you're doing against the rest of the market
when it comes to recruiter outreach, downtime, daily-rate, number of
clients - you should be able to in the average/mean tables or by looking at
the raw data (linked in the results).

What are your thoughts?

On Tue, 29 Apr 2025 at 09:41, Tadas <tadastamo at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello LRUG,
>
> I am Tadas, the person behind Switching to Contracting in the UK Guide
> <https://github.com/tadast/switching-to-contracting-uk>, UK IT
> Contractors Discord <https://discord.gg/7cTKmSwFwd>community, a long-time
> rubyist and a contractor.
>
> Recently, I’ve noticed an uptick in interest in switching to contracting,
> but at the same time, others are moving to permanent roles in search of
> stability. Everybody's asking "what's the market like?", but nobody has
> data. Let's fix that!
>
> There has also been some talk here on LRUG list, prompted by accidental
> reply-all responses providing a glimpse into daily rates, which makes me
> think that there is a lot of interest in this topic.
>
> So if you've contracted in the last 12 months, please take a few minutes
> to fill out *this anonymous survey.* <https://forms.gle/qXsUAczBLh94aZGB7>
> Feel free to share in other relevant communities or your personal circles!
>
> https://forms.gle/qXsUAczBLh94aZGB7
>
> I'll share the results in a follow-up post on LRUG once we have enough
> data.
>
> Thanks!
> --
> Tadas Tamo
> Contractor/Product Engineer <https://www.codeme.lt/>
> Join my Discord community for UK Contractors
> <https://discord.gg/uteWnwP9CU>
>


-- 
Tadas
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