Biz Tips: What’s a Fair Rate to Pay the Average Contract Content Writer in San Francisco?
GROWTH:
What’s a Fair Rate to Pay the Average Contract Content Writer in San Francisco?
As someone who gets paid to write, it’s easy to forget the plight of the uninitiated.
But imagine that you’re a first-time buyer of writing services.
In this online writing store, you can buy a 1000-word blog post for $12/post or you can buy a couple taglines for a few thousand dollars.
In other words, everybody is all over the place. And it’s time for a baseline. So here it is:
Take the real cost of employing a full-time writer — including taxes, benefits, and the real biggie: wasted time — and you’ve got your baseline.
It’s $55.05 per hour.
Don’t believe me? Then keep reading.
Finding The Real Cost
I start by finding the average annual base salary of a full-time content writer in San Francisco. According to Glassdoor, that number is $66,513.
To get the real cost though, we need a couple more steps.
Disclaimer: I am aware that this number is much lower nationwide ($48,729 to be exact), but SF is where I work, so that’s what I’m looking at.
Finding the Average Hourly Cost of a Full-Time Writer
If you figure that there are 52 weeks in a year and 40 hours per work week, with a salary of $66,513, the average full-time content writer earns an hourly rate of $31.98.
As every employer knows, though, an employee’s salary or hourly rate is not even close to the cost of that employee.
BLS data says that, in the private sector, “wages and salaries” account for just 69.7% of the cost of an employee to the employer.