Home office as a new freelancer standard

freelancer work from the home office

In these times, many Ceos are very proud of how they managed to send several thousand employees from one day to the next to the home office without any negative impact on the business. On the contrary, behind the scenes, some bosses admitted that their employees have suddenly become even more productive.

Performance is performance no matter where it is accomplished

This has, as now a current evaluation of the freelance portal freelance.de shows, also effects on the work of the IT self-employed. Even before Corona, the clients were not so easy to let the freelancer work from the home office. As consulting firms and also freelancers confirm, a day of home office work for the external consultants was usually the highest of the feelings on which a customer got involved. Because, when he had to pay the high hourly rate, he wanted to have the self-employed also "on his lap". And behold, from one day to the next they were all sitting at home and running. The analysis of the portal specializing in freelancers is clear: the number of projects with remote share has increased by around 75 percent compared to the pre-corona period. A few months ago, the share of projects with remote options accounted for 20 percent of all projects - this percentage has now almost doubled.

Stefan Oberdörfer, Chief Brand Officer (CBO) of freelance.de, is convinced that "Change the normal is" and that the "old days" will not come back. The clients are pleased to note that the projects can also be professionally processed from home, says: In the future, a proper proportion of remote work will always be agreed as a matter of course - and the trend is rising. With the consequence that so also the fees get into motion. Although Oberdörfer weighs down: "Performance is performance, no matter where it is accomplished", but it is also true, that travel and accommodation costs are thus eliminated and that the fee negotiations between personnel service provider and client or also between personnel service provider and freelancer will certainly be conducted "more intensively" in the future.

Where freelance hourly rates are still rising

Fact is that the hourly rates, so another realization of the freelance.de evaluation - on a high level - stagnate. The general hourly rate across all IT occupations (including project management) is 91 euros, which is also roughly the pre-corona level. The downer for the women: their hourly rate is around 80 euros. According to the freelance.de evaluation, the SAP experts get through the crisis best: Their hourly rate is declining in the single-digit percentage range and is on average at 90 euros. Five euros less per hour, 85 euros, also with a slightly decreasing trend, are taken up by the IT security professionals. Only the developers come out of the crisis strengthened at the moment: their hourly rate rises from 70 to 78 euros per hour.


A good confirmation for the fee development is another survey, namely the most requested skills. Here, SAP know-how comes first, before Java knowledge, Abap and C++ know-how. Programming languages dominate this ranking, as Javascipt, C# and Python also appear in the top ten. Before Corona, Cobol and Perl were among the most requested skills - that has now been done.