Ask HN: Employee vs. W2 Contract vs. 1099 Contract Rates

W-2 would be $150,000/year, if you are living in a popular metro area and you are a senior engineer you should look to increase the salary, insure you are also getting RSUs, signing bonus, benefits, and more if possible.

1099 would be $300,000/year minimum ($144.23/hour, round this up to $145 an hour - $301,600/year or $150 an hour - $312,000/year)as you will need to pay for you own benefits.

These benefits could be vacation, sick days, equipment (you can expense this on your taxes), travel (you can charge (you client for driving to and from work), pay quarterly taxes, hire sub-contractors, pay medical, vision, dental, life insurance, 401k, etc. Though, you would normally be better off running your own business (LLC or Inc) to take full advantage of the benefits you would get as a business vs an individual (more tax and business benefits that do not exist for an individual).

You will also need to work on getting additional customers to insure you do not have only one customer in case they pay late, go out of business, "want to change direction", etc. to decrease your risk. Though, in an ideal situation you would have employees or contractors that you could contract out work to, while you focus on gaining more business and/or building products and services (upgrade from the hourly rate situation), and make money off the passive income of your workers which would enable you to pay them more over time and grow your business to stay competitive.

Insure you check the tax brackets for 2019 https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/irs-provides-tax-inflation-adju...