Hajra Naz
Discover the factors behind the best freelance jobs: highest pay, minimal hustle, exceptional stability, and low competition. Evaluate your current situation and consider potential improvements.
Freelancing encompasses more than just financial gain; it involves security, competition, and the time-value balance for each project. But how can you strike the perfect equilibrium?
To simplify career decisions, Nerdwallet has researched to identify the most enticing freelance industries, choosing to start or switch careers easier.
The grade for each freelancing occupation
After considering earning potential, hustle, stability, and competitiveness, the researchers created a star grade for each freelancing occupation. The approach is as follows:
- Best paid:
Researchers examined typical freelance day rates and UK consumer price inflation (CPI) data for June 2023 to determine this year’s earning rates.
- Least hustle:
The number of freelancing jobs you would need to take on to match the average yearly full-time earnings for each profession was calculated by researchers. This quantity of labor is referred to as “hustle.”
- Most Stable:
Per examining the number of tasks accessible per profession on the freelancing jobs website Upwork as well as the typical project working duration, researchers calculated the potential number of available freelancer jobs (by working days).
- Least competitive:
They studied the number of open positions for more than 480 Upwork employees, categorizing them by occupation. The proportional number of postings for each Google search for freelance jobs was then calculated.
A few captivating data points are introduced in the following chart.
| Rank | Professions | Best paid rating (out of 5) | Least hustle rating (out of 5) | Most stable rating (out of 5) | Least competitive rating (out of 5) | Best overall score (out of 5) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Developers | 3.4 | 4.0 | 5.0 | 5.0 | 4.4 |
| 2 | Market research | 5.0 | 4.6 | 0.6 | 3.3 | 3.4 |
| 3 | Data | 4.9 | 5.0 | 2.0 | 1.2 | 3.3 |
| 4 | Strategy | 4.7 | 3.9 | 0.7 | 1.6 | 2.7 |
| 5 | UX | 4.6 | 4.3 | 0.6 | 0.8 | 2.6 |
| 6 | Marketing | 1.3 | 4.6 | 3.0 | 1.1 | 2.5 |
| 7 | Client Services | 2.1 | 4.5 | 1.0 | 1.5 | 2.3 |
| 8 | QA & Testing | 3.0 | 4.9 | 0.5 | 0.6 | 2.2 |
| 9 | Project management | 3.0 | 4.4 | 0.7 | 0.7 | 2.2 |
| 10 | Social media | 0.9 | 4.5 | 1.6 | 1.5 | 2.1 |
| 11 | PR | 2.4 | 4.6 | 0.5 | 0.5 | 2.0 |
| 12 | Creatives | 2.5 | 3.1 | 1.6 | 0.7 | 2.0 |
| 13 | Designers | 1.7 | 2.1 | 1.7 | 1.4 | 1.7 |
| 14 | Film & Motion | 2.1 | 0.5 | 0.7 | 1.5 | 1.2 |
| 15 | Photography | 2.1 | 1.1 | 0.5 | 0.6 | 1.1 |
| 16 | Studio | 0.5 | 0.8 | 0.5 | 0.7 | 0.6 |
Source: Nerdwallet
With 4.4 ratings, developers easily took the top spot as the finest freelancing career in 2023 due to their low competition level and high stability. This includes front-end and back-end developers and those working on games, apps, and emails.
With 3.4 stars, market research is the second-best freelancing career due to being the best-paid sector. This is the case despite only receiving a stability rating of 0.6 stars.
Data scored highly for earnings and placed third with 3.3 stars. This ranking likewise results from the way that, of the multitude of occupations considered, you would have to deal with the least projects each year to match the normal full-time pay in that industry. Engineers, researchers, and data analysts are totally utilized in this field.
It was ranked fourth thanks to the day rates provided for accepting freelance strategy work, but its overall score was reduced to 2.7 stars due to a lack of consistency. A similar issue plagued user experience (UX) specialists, who came in fifth place with an overall rating of 2.6 stars in a competitive field with little consistency.
