Nigeria has been ranked 23rd nation paying high for freelancers across the globe.
With a $163 per job, in a study conducted by software company, Bookipi, deploying the freelancing platform, Upwork, to find how much freelancers in 40 different countries get, beamed search light on several popular services, including logo design, video editing and data entry.
For each service, the starting and ending prices were collated, and an average price was calculated.
Specifically, while Australia has the most expensive freelancers, with an average price of $594.56 per duty, the country was also found to be the most expensive country to hire temporary workers for creative writing, web programming and mobile application development projects.
India came second at $501, and equally ranked as the most expensive freelancing country for data entry, at an average price of $75.92 per job.
Morocco ranked third with an average freelancer rate of $402.03 per job. It also emerged as the second most expensive country for video editing, costing an average of $122.35 per job. The country also led other African countries.
Ranking as the fourth most expensive country to hire a freelancer is Saudi Arabia, with an average rate of $401.64 for a job.
Rounding off the top five is Turkey, with a cost of $393.88 per freelancing job.
The other countries in the top 20 include Nepal, $382; Portugal, $380.03; Serbia, $347.07; United Kingdom, $343.52; France, $329.71; Ukraine, $314.51; Canada, $298.40 and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), $285.52.
The rest are Pakistan, $284.17; China, $273.97; Macedonia, $262.75; United States, $243.72; Vietnam, $223.67; Italy, $201.33 and Spain, $187.
At the other end of the scale, Columbia has the least expensive freelancers, costing an average of $72.13 per job – 87 per cent less than hiring an Australian freelancer on average.
Brazil followed as the second least expensive, with an average rate of $79.81 per freelancing job, while Argentina ranked third least expensive with an average cost of $80.84.
Speaking on the findings, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Bookipi, Tim Lee, noted: “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 in 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 reflect 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 specialised 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.”
Ranking of other African countries put Egypt at 24th with $157.16; South Africa, 28th with $138.88 per freelancer; Tunisia, 30th at $136 and Kenya’s $111.99 at 32nd position.
Explaining the methodology, the study said a data scrape of Upwork was carried out to ascertain which countries are charging the most money for freelancing services. It said 119 countries were initially included in the analysis, but due to data limitations, 40 nations were eventually sampled and ranked.
Further, it said the scrape gathered pricing data on freelancing projects, which fell into one of the following: logo design, video editing, data entry, virtual assistant, social media management, resume writing, creative writing, web programming and mobile applications.
The starting and ending prices for each project were gathered, and a median price for each project was calculated based on available figures, in addition to the freelancers’ location.
“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 anomaly. For the category-specific rankings, a minimum of three project listings were used,” the study explained.