hourly rate for research?

[wondering]

Hi all,

I'm a postdoc who's just run across an ad from an international development agency looking for someone to do background research for a policy-based article (someone else will be doing the writing). They've asked applicants to state their hourly rate. Does anyone have a sense of what I should be able to ask for in this case since I have my PhD?

Thanks for your advice!

[just a thought]

Maybe what you could do is base it on an adjunct pay per course, dividing it by the number of weeks in one term then by number of hours per week. That could give you a ballpark of the rate that you might want to charge. But that's just a thought.

[yep]

Consulting work like this doesn't necessarily honor pay grades based on degrees. So, given that you have one chance to make the proposal, you have to weigh the "cheap enough that they'll hire me" against "expensive enough that they'll think I can do a good job."

In other words, don't just give it the cheapest rate. You might think about pitching a less fungible overall project cost for certain deliverables of whatever thousands of dollars, based on your own calculations with valuing your time which leaves you some room to negotiate about the timeline and the actual products. (I'd assume something between $25 and $75, and vastly overestimating your hours - if you are doing quant work, take a number on the high end.) However, you should keep in mind that consultants generally take a loss on the first few projects of a given kind, in order to generate some standard templates that allow them to make money when doing repeat work of a similar type.

So overall, it's best if you think about what you can live with for the work, and then bump it up by at least 50% to 2x in order to be able to cover non-reimbursable costs, additional taxes, and so forth. This provides a nice cushion, because you will inevitably be asked to do additional tweaking of the final product, and that can eat up any profit you might have made.

[worth]

I think the answer to this depends entirely on the client. Pitch higher if inter-governmental/UN, official government agency, or large private foundation. Think lower if a less-established NGO or smaller organization with less funding.

A good way to think about this would be in terms of daily rates (8 hour days), as most international development consultants would be paid on such a rate. Even a junior consultant being paid by a larger/official agency can command $250-300 a day when you consider overheads etc.. More senior/experienced consultants a lot more than that. Derive an hourly rate from that. I would start no lower than $30/hr minimum.

Good luck!