Blog

Most contractors would agree that their average daily rates have either reduced over the last 10 years or have not moved.

It seems rare to see big companies doing big projects and offering consultants $1300-$1800 a day freely for long term contracts.

Instead we see conservative offerings of short-term contracts with considerably lower budgets or, to reduce costs even more, Fixed Term Contracts where a salary is offered, but with the addition of sick leave, annual leave and superannuation.

We were interested in looking into this to see if there were in fact reductions, how drastic the reductions were, or if we could see any trends. To do this we dived back in time into the Speller archives of contracts past.

Here’s what we found:

The above is just a snapshot of a few placements over the years with no plan or pattern, but it’s useful when mixed with market knowledge to make a few observations.

From looking at the past, it seems surprising that there is not much moment overall, but when you break it down and look at the individual skill sets there are a few interesting things….

Functional Roles

From the small selection in the table, we can see that functional consultants ranged from $800-$1000 per day. In our current market it is generally the same. Over the last 5 years, functional consultants in most SAP modules average about $800 per day. Obviously, there are variances, depending on project or support roles, a client’s budget or how rare the skill is but it’s good to know that the good old functional consultant is still in demand.

Technical Roles

Developers have had a rocky road over the years with a boom period in the mid 2000’s, then a slump with a large amount of outsourcing around 2013 and 2014. The ‘new developer’ then emerged; UI5, Fiori, ODATA, and Gateway. The rate that the classical ABAP developer could demand definitely decreased through these years, but developers with the ‘new technologies’ are in demand again and going strong. This is mainly due to some big government projects that have been in full swing for some time now, using hundreds of developers nationally.

Security

Security has been a whole different ballgame. You can see one example on the table of a Security contractor in 2008 on a rate of $1,000 per day. The last 7 years has seen a steady decline in the demand for SAP Security consultants and virtually no demand in the last 2 years. However, we have seen a need for Cyber Security and more general security consultants.

Project Managers

Project Managers have always maintained a steady rate and up to this day can generally get a rate of at least $1000. In the mid 2000’s it wasn’t unheard of for Project Managers to be getting rates of $1300-$1400 per day, as you can see an example from 2007 in the table. We would say that this is due to the boom time of big mining companies implementing SAP Globally and having plenty of resources.

From knowing the SAP market and the changes that have been happening over the past 5 years in the technology, the table reflects these changes. The changes we’ve seen are the demand in Functional roles as business process is very important, the reduction in SAP BW after the HANA/ S4 revolution, and ABAP and BASIS have seen a decrease due to more general technical allrounders.

At the moment in these uncertain times, who knows what may happen moving forward. We could all go through another transformation.

If you have experienced the changes in the SAP market please feel free to comment on your experiences, we’d love to hear from you.

Follow us on LinkedIn for more SAP and Speller news and updates.