What is a typical hourly rate being charged out for PHP development work? I am hearing that some clients are expecting 20 hours of work for under $300. Are there really developers working at these rates?

There will always be people willing to undercut any price put forward unfortunately.

Originally posted by Barak
There will always be people willing to undercut any price put forward unfortunately.

I work for beer :D...
Just kidding...

It really depends on what you want done. I've charged anywhere between $10 - $60/hr depending on the complexity of the program and my familarity of the actual code.

The $60/hr was debugging and editing a poorly written web based store that was designed by someone else. It was spanned across 30 files (I would have written it in 4), uncommented, and awful function designs (i.e. no parameters passed, echo'd directly out instead of returning vars when it should have, awful varible naming schema ($z1 for $product_name, etc))....

Agreed. I understand that when you have to clean up someone else's mess or when a client has an 'urgent' job then the rates are going to be higher.

What I meant was if a job was put out for tender, for example, then what is the commercial market rates that might be quoted?

Is this too much like the proverbial string?

Most of our clients prefer to have a quote for an entire piece of work - we work it out by estimating how long it would take and charging an hourly rate of £30 GBP = ~$50 USD.

We're often not the cheapest, and our clients often know that. In fact, we're almost always undercut by cheaper Indian programmers.

It doesn't come down on price, at least not with serious clients.

Well... I can't exactly tell whether or not your trying to find out how much we charge b/c your trying to figure out how much to charge yourself or your expecting to need some work done for you?

If your looking to know how much you should charge the answer is very simple. How much do you think your skills and your time are worth to someone else? If it's worth $5/hr to you, then that's what it's worth...

If you trying to estimate costs, my advice (as ice said) money isn't the end all. The company I talked about earlier paid the original developer less than me (barely) to design the site in the first place. Ask to see examples of their work and source code. Ask to talk to past clients. Remember a bad programmer costs more than a good one in the long run.

BTW.. I forgot a good quote an old co-worker said to me once.

"A programmer is like a hooker. You can get a cheap one or a fancy one and they'll both get the job done but, in the morning the cheap one will probably leave you with some awful bugs in your object instantiation."

I concur with ice53ltd, it's not always down to price... quite often the level of PHP coding you have and the quality of your work.

Surprisingly there are a lot of big clients unwilling to take on the cheapest programmer as it doesn't mean it's the best.