Part of being a freelancer is spending time finding work and doing a variety of things that clients would consider non-billable but still cost time. If you're going to work 40 hours a week, not all 40 will typically be billable in freelancing.

My mother did NGO environmental policy freelancing in the 00's. She would land a contract for 40k for two months of work, then spend the next 4 months looking for more work.

Being a subject matter expert means that you can be paid well for your work, but the numbers of jobs that require expertise in the Kura-Aras river basin can be few are far between.

many things are more expensive when you don't work at a company - for example the health care for a marginal employee at GE is a lot cheaper than you'll get for yourself.

I always used 2x, but probably 2.5x is a sensible way to think about it in a patio11 "charge more than you think you should" mold.

Healthcare cost doesn't scale with the $200 base salary, though.

> many things are more expensive when you don't work at a company - for example the health care for a marginal employee at GE is a lot cheaper than you'll get for yourself.

This is less true following the Affordable Care Act than it used to be. The unsubsidised marketplace rate for my Kaiser health insurance seems fairly close to what I pay for COBRA from my former big tech employer.

But COBRA is more expensive than the same plan when paid by the employer with pre-tax dollars.

Interesting.

My Kaiser almost doubled from COBRA and coverage went from better-than-platinum to high deductible gold.

Google / SF market.

I have Google COBRA in SF too and when I last looked a year or so ago it was about $100/year more on the marketplace for the KP platinum plan.

Age makes a huge difference to the marketplace premiums though.

1.5x for long term contracts. 2~2.5x for short term gigs.

Most? I can't think of a gig beyond maybe a couple of folks in a coworking space where I wouldn't be laughed out of the room with "just make it 150% of salary and we'll figure out the real number whenever". Virtually every company I've ever worked with budget the actual number, because they know how much the overhead cost is. There's a huge difference between "a number I use when asked 'ballpark how much a new hire is gonna run us'" and "what is the amount of money I'm asking the CEO to allocate me in next years budget".

Depends on the kind of work you do and the competition. A former employer was really desperate for pretty journeyman-level Django Dev help a few years ago and for some reason it was just super tight. Ended up paying more like 350% after looking a few weeks. We obviously weren't going to hire someone at that rate for a 6 month contract but for short term help? Sure.

Well, sure...there's always a one-off where you have to throw out the rulebook on salary. But any HR team worthy of the name can still compute the actual overhead on that base pretty much to the dollar.