A study conducted by invoicing software company, Bookipi, has revealed that Nigerians are among the least expensive freelancers on one of the leading freelancing platforms, Upwork.

Nigeria ranked 18th out of 40 countries studied, charging an average of $163 per job, while freelancers from Colombia, which ranked as the number one least expensive country, charge an average of $73.13 per job.

On the other hand, freelancers from Australia are ranked as the most expensive. According to the report, Australian freelancers charge an average of $594.56 per job.

Other countries

The second least expensive country is Brazil, where the average price of hiring a freelancer was found to be $79.81. In third is Argentina with an average freelancer rate of $80.84 per job. They are also the second cheapest country for a virtual assistant freelancer, according to the report.

Ranking as the fourth least expensive country is Jamaica, with an average rate of $88.63 per job. Venezuela came 5th with a cost of $93.41 per freelancing job.

At the other end of the scale, India follows Australia as the second most expensive, with an average rate of $501.00 per freelancing job, while Morocco ranked third most expensive with an average cost of $402.03.

Economic factor

Speaking on the findings, Tim Lee, CEO and founder of Bookipi, said:

• “Our team members come from various corners of the world – Asia, Africa, Europe, and America and their life stories and experiences contribute to our team’s richness. Working closely together has taught me an immense amount about appreciating different cultures.
• “As a result, we were interested in how these different experiences are reflected through the costs of freelance workers worldwide.
• “Typically, countries with robust economies and high living standards tend to host the most expensive freelancers, which the data reflects by finding Australia as the most expensive freelance country.
• “Although this is true for India, the second country to appear in the ranking, freelancers can command a higher rate thanks to their specialized skills and expertise in industries such as software development, IT services, and digital marketing.
• “We hope this ranking will help empower freelance workers around the world to know their worth and be more confident in fairly pricing their services.”

How the data was collected

Bookipi said it carried out a data scrape of the freelance site Upwork to find which countries are charging the most money for freelancing services. According to the company, 119 countries were initially included in the analysis, but data limitations left 40 countries that could be compared and ranked fairly.

• “This scrape gathered pricing data on freelancer projects that fell into one of the following ten categories: Logo Design, Video Editing, Data Entry, Virtual Assistant, SEO, Social Media Management, Resume Writing, Creative Writing, Web Programming, and Mobile Apps.
• “The starting price and ending price for each project were gathered, and a median price for each project was calculated based on these two figures. The country location of the freelancer who hosting the project was also gathered,” the company explained.

For the overall country ranking, the median price of freelance services was based on a minimum of 10 projects for each country. This was meant to avoid any anomalies. For the category-specific rankings, a minimum of three project listings were used.

[Nairametrics]