A proposal for the freelancer community

[goyalpulkit]

I have been working as a freelancer for some time now and I have a proposal for the freelancer community. Paid vacation days are one of the things that I miss as a freelancer. While there are no Federal laws in the United States that require an employer to offer paid vacation days as a benefit, employers of choice offer employees paid vacation days. Vacation days are quite common in Europe with Switzerland having a minimum of 20 such days per year, U.K. 28 days and Germany 24.

The proposal that I want to make to the freelancer community is to include a percentage of the working hours as vacation days for every freelancing project. This might be chosen depending on your experience and the country that you belong to. For example, about 10 hours for every 160 hours of work sounds reasonable as vacation hours. This would make for about 16 working days in a year that we can take off for vacations.

What do you think about this? Does this sound reasonable or you would still prefer charging for what you work and then take unpaid vacations?

[patio11]

The typical way we handle this is to a) charge much, much more than a full-time employee does over a similar increment of time and b) when we want to take a vacation, we simply don't schedule engagements.

As a freelancer/consultant doing programming, your rate should be comfortably high enough that your cash flow situation is rock-solid without working on a week to week basis. (If you disagree that your cash-flow situation is rock solid, HN reader, you are not charging enough. Raise your rates. If your cash flow situation is rock solid raise your rates anyway, you're still undercharging.)

The typical target utilization rate for a consulting firm is 70~80% ish, which means you get 10+ weeks of vacation a year. My business is a little quirky, but I would probably get 30+ weeks. It flows naturally from charging appropriately and, critically, never, ever, ever depends on a client saying Yes to your vacation.

[kls]

If you rate does not account for unpaid time you are charging too little. My rate supports my ability to take unpaid time as well as between contract time. It is a reality of freelancing and if the market demands freelancers then the market has to bare the rate of those non-productive hours if not freelancing ceases to be economically viable. Too many people that get into freelancing look at an hourly rate and compare that to the salaried rate they where making, they think oh wow that is more money, but they never factor in down-time. A few hard lessons later and they generally double their rate or leave freelancing all together.

[goyalpulkit]

I would feel comfortable in keeping something like this explicitly mentioned rather than charging more without any explanation.

[ffumarola]

You should definitely be pricing that into your rate already, IMO.

[CowboyRobot]

If I were to start asking for explicit time off, I would have to start explaining all the time off I take now without telling anyone.

[mforsberg]

I have thought about this too living in Sweden where I as an employee had 25 days of vacation a year and how to bring that in to my freelancing.

As I see it; impossible. You can charge an extra in time or money to make up for it, but when you go on vacation as a freelancer you do not have anyone running the office.