Is your hourly rate on the rise or plummeting?

I am fortunate to have some amazing support nearby and we will be releasing some interesting data that we have recently collected from the candidate contractor market.

Two of the topics we enquired about were, how has your contract rate changed in the last 6 months and how do you predict that your contract rate will change in the next 6 months.

We surveyed close to 200 contractors regarding the question, how has your contract rate changed in the last 6 months, and 44% of them had realised a rate increase - while 49% had remained at their current level and 7% had taken a reduction.

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Part of me wants to go down a rabbit hole on these and ask questions like ‘what were the reasons that the 7% took a pay reduction’?

What these numbers do show me is that things are on the rise and we must do a survey again in the next 3 / 6 months as I suspect that percentage will be 10% - 20% higher.

Following on was how do you predict that your contract rate will change in the next 6 months. We had 38% of the respondents answer ‘I predict an increase’, while 60% responded ‘I predict my rate will remain unchanged’.

I thought given the current commentary around the tight labour market and no obvious dates in mind around borders being reopened which would allow new talent to arrive the ‘I predict it will increase’ percentage to be higher.

As a side note these are mostly technology contractors surveyed, working in New Zealand and next time we will look to provide some stats on role types to see what areas are feeling chipper and bullish!!

I’d love to get other's thoughts and opinions on this topic. Will rates creep higher or plummet once the borders open up?