current tech wages

[moreaxe]

im thinking of coming back to england after 3 years working as event technician in southern europe. could anyone tell me the going rate for a freelance av event technician with 3-4 experience in the uk at the mo????

 

thanks guys

[tokm]

Most common rate ive seen is £150 a day.. Thats for a rigger/sparkie/noise boy. So AV must be around that sort of mark.

 

Tom

[Guest lightnix]

£150? Be serious ;) I was charging that as a (non-theatre) rate about 12 years ago. It had risen to £185 per day by 2000 and these days I push for £200, although there is some flexiblility in that depending on the overall deal (14 day payment usually gets a discount). That's as a freelance conference / event lampie.

 

There are sadly some companies who will still try to force you down to a decade-old rate of £175 a day, my advice is to say "No".

[steve1159]

I think that as usual there is a lot of variation on these things. I know a lot of freelancers that as a general sound/lighting tech (i.e. not LD etc) look for about £125-175. Equally I know of one company that pays a standard rate to all freelancers of £200 per day and was recently at a London corporate job where the freelancers were working on £95/£100 for the day (15hr day excluding travel). Ultimately it is all going down to negotiation between the client and the freelancer to agree a rate that both parties are happy with for the work involved

[paulears]

a 15 hour day for £100? Nix said the sensible stuff. Now, to be honest if the work is on my doorstep, as in less than 15mins travel - I'm happy to take a bit less than my usual rate, but not a lot. I was offered a great job (they said) recently which was a short 1 hour job - £120 plus travel @37p mile, food and hotel. The trouble was it was a 5 hour drive there and the same back. I quite fancied this one, so did it, but I left home at lunch time, and was back next day at ten pm - that is 34 hours for £120 - ridiculous when looked at from the hours vs money viewpoint. That all said, I'll do the job again next time.

 

For conventional, normal, pay the mortgage type work, then I find that the kind of rates nix talks about are what reputable clients expect you to charge. If they won't pay this - what other corners are they cutting? It is obviously down to personal choice, if you want to work cheap - maybe because you're just starting out, that's fine - just think about if you are being ripped off.

 

I remember one job last year, at the end I was chatting to the boss of the event. He said "I'm surprised you were so cheap - I'd got the budget to pay you £250 pd if you had asked for it!"

[steve1159]

I remember one job last year, at the end I was chatting to the boss of the event. He said "I'm surprised you were so cheap - I'd got the budget to pay you £250 pd if you had asked for it!"

 

 

I bet you kicked yourself and wished you had asked for more.

 

The other concern that I have when people are willing to work very cheap (such as £100 for 15h) is that the costs for the company doing the job are down and potentially they can therefore undercut some of the more reputable companies to get the work. As stated above what else is also being cut (insurance, maintenance of kit etc) when companies are going down this route. You just have to hope that the end client is after value for money and not just the cheapest.

[David Lee]

Going day rate in corporate is £200-£225 for general tech (not HODs).+ Pd.s, travel, accom if more than one night etc. I do work for less for certain companies but it is rare. - based on a 12hr day before we go into double days like I have tonight - midnight get in followed by day show...

[soundo26]

Interesting thread this one!!

 

I am Technical Director in an events company and we try to do the best for the people we employ, I am also primarily, a technician, not an office suit and also sometimes get involved on the client end of things whenever needed so I see things from both sides of the fence!

 

We employ freelancers as well as our own staff and our policy is to be as fair as possible. These days we have large problems with clients and budgets. The industry is not as buoyant as it used to be and is extremely competitive and unfortunately, customer driven. This causes huge problems when quoting for jobs. If we start off quoting at reasonable rates for an event often we never hear from the client again, there are too many companies out there undercutting any reasonable level of costings given so we are forced to quote keenly in the first place and if we are lucky, the client will come back and try to negotiate the price to a bargain basement level. anyway, the bottom line is that these days there is very little profit in any job despite what many techs might think!!

 

Add to that, the biggest cost other than the very expensive equipment which must be paid for is crewing. Now, you guys who are freelancing are in a similar market, a very competitive market.....whilst some of you ask £200-£225+pds, expenses, travel etc. most general techs go out for £165-£185, if you were in our position who would you choose??? The company hiring you must also have the room to mark up your cost too, this may sound harsh but, you are at the end of the day a resource, just like any piece of kit included in the job and have other costs attached to you that must be covered so there would usually be a £25 mark-up on your cost over the day which is resonable but not greedy.

 

In the quoting stage, the biggest sticking point and the item most contended by our clients is crew costs and if they see that general techs are going at over £200 for a day's work, they freak out, £225-250 for a skilled tech such as a camera operator, data/PowerPoint tech is the absolute max that a client is willing to pay at the moment (with the odd,very rare exception), Add to this, the costs of accommodation, food drink, travel etc. and you can see how it goes. there is a very real barrier here, the client compares the rates we (you) charge, to the rates being paid in their own organisations and cannot see the equation. We try to crew a job at the right level, try to get single-room accommodation for our techs and try to keep working ours to a minimum but we are really up against it out there,,,,,,,

 

I can see that this subject may get quite emotional, don't shoot me, I'm only the messenger, I feel the same way as you do, as I said before, I am a tech, I am on your side, I only write this to make some of you aware of the real world, I feel that this will run.....................................................

[David Lee]

For local (read not London) work £185 is fine (wouldn't go below it personally but thats my decision) - hell I sometimes work for London companies at that rate - fills in a bit of spare time.

 

To qualify my prices, I work all over the UK and Europe for international event organisers who have multinational companies for clients, so they usually have decent budgets. I wouldn't expect local companies holding events to have that kind of budget. I don't demand people to pay me that, its just the going rate.

 

I certainly wouldn't expect that kind of money crewing theatre or music events. Be nice though. I could afford to get back into Theatre and Music.

 

Fortunately, I am very busy so I don't have to worry about cutting my rates in order to get work ;)

 

 

they freak out, £225-250 for a skilled tech such as a camera operator, data/PowerPoint tech

 

p.s - not a dig,but my opinion is all techs are skilled, not just camera ops and data boys.

 

edit:

 

looking at your web site Soundo26, I would say that you are one of the companies I would automatically charge £225.00 a day. Basically any international events co. should be able to put that through the budget.

 

I agree with your point that if you have good techs who are willing to go out at £165 - £185 a day then thats fine I wouldn't blame you for booking them. I take it that you are a hire company who do production as well (or vice versa). Thing is I mainly work for production companies who sub hire kit and bring us techs in to put it all together - far nicer for us lot ;) (I think they put more of the mark up on kit hire and crew at cost.)

 

Any way I think I am digressing from the point, there are many different levels of pay in freelancing from low paid theatre work to the top jobs in corporate gibberish - as long as you enjoy what you are doing and happy with the money then stick to it. Its certainly better than wearing a suit.

[Light Console]

Right time for a rethink, I currently charge £75/day for me AND my kit! Many thanks!

[Guest lightnix]

Alright, so £185 can (under some circumstances) still just about be seen as a reasonable rate (from my end). it strikes me, though, that possibly the biggest downward pressure on rates at the moment is coming from...

 

 

 

...the crew themselves :(

 

 

 

Like I said, in 2000 I put my rates up by an extortionate £10 per day, because at the time I had been charging £175 per day for the previous 3-4 years i.e. since around 1996-7 and because I had noticed that despite increasing my gross income, my net income (after the usual allowable expenses) was shrinking. Since then, we have had the events of 9/11/01, which were largely responsible for the trebling of PL premiums since then and now we see the requirement to produce evidence of training, looming on the horizon; training that will cost around £100 a day, regardless of the course.

 

Also (as ranted over at length elsewhere ;) ), since the mid 80s - early-90s, the complexity and sophistication of the technology we use has increased dramatically and continues to do so. Not only does this equipment require a higher level of knowledge and competence to rig operate and maintain, it also requires a larger, fancier and more expensive tool kit.

 

When I started out freelancing (1987), mobile phones were just about getting down to house brick-size. I got my first one in 1992, at which time they were still a luxury for many and most freelancers used pagers. If you needed to call the office (or your family) then there was usually a Crew Phone in the Production Office. That's gone now and an internationally-activated mobile is now de rigeur for all freelancers; even a shortish (14 day) job can easily land you with a bill of over £200 for that month - believe me, I've had more than a few myself :( The same goes for laptops, they may not be a universal necessity yet, but they are fast heading that way.

 

Then there's the rising cost of everything else: insurance, self-employed NICs, my accountants fees, PETROL, train fares, Council Tax, Road Tax, various stealth taxes, etc...

 

This is on top of the general reluctance on the part of anybody to pay for any pre-production time, let alone the hours that you actually put in, in advance, to ensure it all goes smoothly on the day.

 

Like any other business, there are only so many cost increases in expense that freelancers can absorb, before they have to start passing them on to their clients. That's a fact of life and a point which has been reached, methinks, if not already exceeded. Are we really to be expected to work for the same rates that were being paidsix to ten years ago???

 

The industry is not as buoyant as it used to be and is extremely competitive and customer driven... there are too many companies out there undercutting any reasonable level of costings given so we are forced to quote keenly in the first place and if we are lucky, the client will come back and try to negotiate... anyway, the bottom line is that these days there is very little profit in any job despite what many techs might think!!

I fully appreciate that industry margins as a whole have fallen, but whose fault is that? From where I'm standing, the "Industry" as a whole has failed and failed miserably, to market itself of any other ticket than being cheap ;) It was bad enough when hire companies started cutting each other's throats on equipment prices (the quality of the kit we were given to work with plummeted), when they started doing it with the crew, that was starting to take the pi get a bit Out Of Order IMVHO. Why should we have our standard of living driven down, because our clients can't sell themselves effectively.

 

As an example of just how ridiculous things have become: Back in the late 1980s, following Maggie's deregulation of the TV industry, studio chiefs woke up to the fact that they could get (in particular) lighting equipment from people other than the TV lighting hire companies (on whom they had previously been forced to rely) and discovered, to their joy and amazement, that this equipment (and the crew who rigged it) cost about a quarter of what they'd been paying previously. Imagine their utter glee, when they also discovered that they could drive these already rock-bottom prices down even further, by setting these new-found suppliers against each other. Trebles all round.

 

:(

 

How did that happen and why was it allowed to?

 

How long ago was that PLASA seminar on how static prices were bringing the business to it's knees? Two, even three years ago? Has anything changed since?

 

Red pill, anybody? ;)

[Simon Lewis]

It's not a criticism of him specifically, but Mattoverall (Training & Qualifications) is happy to

travel almost anywhere within europe given notice and depending on the project will work at no cost or expense only.

;-)

[gareth]

It's not a criticism of him specifically, but Mattoverall (Training & Qualifications) is happy to

travel almost anywhere within europe given notice and depending on the project will work at no cost or expense only.

;-)

Without wishing to offend Matt, it's fairly clear from the rest of his post that he and his mates are pretty inexperienced when it comes to technical work, and that what they're effectively after is work experience rather than actual work. I hope that's the case, anyway - if it's not, and they are actually willing to work for nothing, then a) it's worth bearing in mind that in this life you get what you pay for, and b) if someone wants to place such a low value on their time and skills that they're willing to give them away for free, then that's a pretty poor show.

[Simon Lewis]

I quoted it because it seems that quite a few in the industry started out this way... and there will be that transition period when the hobby gets serious but the gear is still free to use....

 

There are some who will do a few jobs for nothing - because the glamour and excitement makes up for it.

 

There are some who will do jobs for low prices - because their day jobs compensate or because the customer is a charity/broke/hadn't planned or budgeted for PA or lighting etc.

 

For every established firm that charges whatever the "going" rate might be, there seems to be someone willing to work for less. Perhaps I'm cynical, but although we are faced with very real increases in costs, someone somewhere will always do it cheaper ;-)

[Guest lightnix]

Actually, gareth, it appears that they all have full time jobs and yes, they will work for free (but can only do so at weekends).

 

The problem is that, knowing this business, there probably are people out there who are... ummm... "trusting" enough to take them on (and unscrupulous enough to charge them out at hundreds of pounds each to the client). Meanwhile, professional technicians, who rely on the business alone to feed themselves and their families, find themselves deprived of work by part-time hobbyists ;)

 

The same problem exists with professional (usually Theatre) crew, moonlighting for stupid rates that geniune freelancers could never realistically charge, as they don't have the financial cushion of a full-time job. You have to wonder how many (if any) are actually registered as self-employed, or have an accountant, or carry any insurance ;)