A study, conducted by invoicing software company Bookipi has unveiled the countries with the most expensive and least expensive freelancers. Using freelancing platform Upwork, the invoicing software company looked into how much freelancers in 40 different countries charge on average per job.
They looked at several popular services, including logo design, video editing, and data entry. For each service in each country, the starting and end price were collected, and an average price overall was calculated.
According to the study, Colombia is the country with the least expensive freelancers, with the average price of a job costing $72.13.
Following in second 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.
Ranking as the fourth most expensive country to hire a freelancer is Jamaica, with an average rate of $88.63 per job. Rounding up the top five is Venezuela, with a cost of $93.41 per freelancing job.
Nigeria ranks 18th according to the study with a freelancing job costing an average of $163 per job.
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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.”
Here are the top 20 countries with the least expensive freelancers according to the study:
| Rank | Country | Average price per freelancing job |
| 1. | Colombia | $72.13 |
| 2. | Brazil | $79.81 |
| 3. | Argentina | $80.84 |
| 4. | Jamaica | $88.63 |
| 5. | Venezuela | $93.41 |
| 6. | Germany | $102.35 |
| 7. | Philippines | $106.70 |
| 8. | Sri Lanka | $107.00 |
| 9. | Kenya | $111.99 |
| 10. | Romania | $113.21 |
| 11. | Tunisia | $136.00 |
| 12. | Indonesia | $136.44 |
| 13. | South Africa | $138.88 |
| 14. | Bangladesh | $145.63 |
| 15. | Bulgaria | $148.12 |
| 16. | Malaysia | $150.00 |
| 17. | Egypt | $157.16 |
| 18. | Nigeria | $163.00 |
| 19. | Georgia | $186.25 |
| 20. | Poland | $186.65 |
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At the other end of the scale, Australia has the most expensive freelancers, costing an average of $594.56 per job. India follows 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.
The United States is the 17th most expensive country to hire a freelancer with an average cost of $243.72 per job. Freelancers in the United Kingdom and Canada are numbers 9th and 12th on the list costing $343.52 and $298.40 respectively.
Data Collection Methodology:
Bookipi claims they did a data scrape of the freelance site Upwork in order to find which countries are charging the most money for freelancing services. 119 countries were initially included in the analysis, but due to data limitations, this left 40 countries that could be compared and ranked fairly.
This scrape focused on pricing data on freelance projects in ten categories, namely; Logo Design, Video Editing, Data Entry, Virtual Assistant, SEO, Social Media Management, Resume Writing, Creative Writing, Web Programming, Mobile Apps.
For each project, the starting price and ending price was collected, and a median price for each project was calculated based on these two figures. The country location of the freelancer offering the project was also noted.
For the overall country ranking, the median price of freelance services was based on a minimum of 10 projects for each country, to avoid any anomalies. For the category-specific rankings, a minimum of three project listings were used.