Is it worth taking a freelance project through a broker at a lower rate?

It can be. Compare what each client pays per hour it really costs you: the fee over the billed hours plus the unbilled ones, including the search that won the work. In this guide's example, a broker project at 95 with half an unbilled hour per 10 billed pays 90, which beats a direct client at 120 who costs 5 unbilled hours per 10 and pays 80. A different direct client at 120 with 2 per 10 pays 100 and beats both.

How much margin do recruitment agencies and IT brokers take?

Brokers rarely show you what the end client pays. Two listed ones publish a group average: Hays kept 15.1% of gross revenue on temporary and contract placements in the year to June 2026, and SThree kept 21.7% of contract revenue in the year to November 2025. Both cover every country and more than freelancers, so read them as a sense of scale, not as your broker's cut.

How many unbilled hours can a direct client cost before a broker project pays more?

Divide the direct rate by what the broker project pays per real hour, subtract 1, and multiply by 10. The result is the number of unbilled hours per 10 billed at which both pay the same. For 120 direct against a broker project that works out to 90.48 per real hour, it is about 3.3.

Broker or direct client: which one pays more per hour it really costs?

A broker's cut comes off the rate where you can see it. A direct client's cost arrives as unbilled hours you do the broker's job in. In a worked example, a broker project at 95 pays 90 per real hour, one direct client at 120 pays 100 and another pays 80. Compare per client, not per channel.

Neither channel pays more on its own. A broker project at 95 can pay more per hour it really costs than a direct client at 120, because the broker’s cut comes off the rate where you can see it, and a direct client’s cost arrives as unbilled hours you cannot. Divide each client’s fee by the billed hours plus the unbilled ones, including the search that won the work, and compare client by client. In the example below, a broker project at 95 pays 90 per real hour, one direct client at 120 pays 100, and another direct client at 120 pays 80, under a floor of 85.

How much does a broker keep?

You usually do not know. Most brokers show you the rate you get, not the rate the end client pays. In freelance.de’s Freelancer-Studie 2026, 37% of freelancers named opaque project requests as a problem in working with brokers.

Two listed brokers publish an average, because they have to. Hays kept 15.1% of its gross revenue on temporary and contract placements in the year to 30 June 2026. SThree kept 21.7% of its contract revenue in the year to 30 November 2025. Germany is the largest market for both. Neither number is German-only or freelancer-only: they cover every country, and Hays’s includes temporary employees. Read them as scale.

The worked example in this guide sits inside that range. The end client pays 120. Through the broker you get 95. The broker keeps 25, which is about 21%.

That 25 is the part everyone sees. It sits right there in the rate, and it is why the direct client at 120 looks like the obvious choice.

What does a direct client cost you in hours?

The broker’s job, done by you, unbilled.

Somebody has to find the client, write the proposal, negotiate the contract, deal with the compliance questions, send the invoice every month and chase the one that is late. Through a broker, much of that is what the 25 pays for. Direct, it lands in your week.

The freelance.de study lists what freelancers find hard about direct contracts: long decision paths (36%), legal uncertainty and compliance such as Scheinselbstständigkeit (34%), price negotiation (30%) and high administrative effort (27%). Every one of those is time, and none of it is on an invoice.

Two parts of that work already have their own guides. The selling that wins a direct client is priced in what a proposal costs you in hours. The chasing is priced in what a late-paying client costs. This page adds them up per client and puts the total next to the broker’s cut.

Do broker projects cost unbilled hours too?

Yes. They just come before the project starts.

The profile you rewrite for each request. The recruiter call that turns out to be a CV collection exercise. Two interviews with the end client. Then, often, nothing. In the same study, 52% named ghosting after a profile send or an interview as a problem with brokers, the most common complaint on the list. CV shopping, profile requests with no real project behind them, came to 38%.

Once the project runs, the unbilled part in the example below is small: a monthly timesheet, an invoice to one address, the odd call with the account manager. So most of the broker project’s unbilled hours sit in the search, and a long full-time engagement spreads that search over a lot of billed hours.

How to compare a broker project with a direct client

Put each client on the same footing: fee over billed hours plus unbilled hours. Unbilled means everything that client cost you that nobody paid for, the search and the proposal included.

A useful way to hold the number is unbilled hours per 10 billed. Then the effective rate is the rate times 10, divided by 10 plus the unbilled hours.

Here is a worked example. It is an example, not a benchmark, with round numbers in euros because brokers like Hays and SThree do most of this business in Germany. Floor 85.

Client	Rate	Unbilled per 10	Effective rate
Broker project	95	0.5 h	90
Direct A	120	2 h	100
Direct B	120	5 h	80

The broker project is six months close to full time: 800 billed hours, and 40 unbilled for the search, the interviews and the timesheets. Direct A is a steady client with a proposal, a contract and a monthly invoice: 400 billed, 80 unbilled. Direct B is a small project with a long proposal, scope calls that never ended, and one invoice that had to be chased twice: 100 billed, 50 unbilled.

Same freelancer, two channels, three clients. The lowest rate on paper lands in the middle. One of the two identical direct rates lands under the floor.

The two direct clients have the same rate on paper and pay 20 apart per real hour. The channel told you nothing about which one was which. The unbilled hours did.

This is the same division as ranking your clients by the hour. The difference is the question you bring to it. Here the question is whether the next project should come through a broker or not, and the honest answer is that it depends on which direct client you would get instead.

Where is the threshold?

Every broker offer has a line: the number of unbilled hours per 10 billed at which a direct client at a higher rate stops paying more.

The formula is short. Divide the direct rate by what the broker project pays per real hour, subtract 1, multiply by 10.

In the example: 120 divided by 90.48 is 1.326. Subtract 1, multiply by 10, and the threshold is about 3.3 unbilled hours per 10 billed. A direct client at 120 who costs less than that pays more than the broker project. One who costs more pays less.

Run it the other way when a broker calls with an offer. If your direct clients sit at 2 unbilled hours per 10 at 120, they pay 100. A broker project with half an hour per 10 has to pay you 105 to match that. At 95, it is about 10 short per real hour, and the conversation about the rate is worth having.

What about the weeks between projects?

A gap is not in any hourly rate. It is weeks with nothing billed, and it costs you in the year, not per hour.

What is in the rate is the search you do during it. In freelance.de’s 2026 study, 26% of freelancers needed more than three months to win a new project, up from 20% a year earlier. freelancermap’s Freelancer-Kompass 2026 found 43% with no secured utilization for the months ahead. Those are all channels, not brokers alone, and they say the search is not a rounding error.

So log the search on the client it produces. The profile updates, the calls, the interviews and the proposals belong to the client they turned into. Search that produced nothing goes on its own non-billable line, where it still counts against your utilization. Filed as general admin, it disappears from every client’s rate and flatters whichever channel needed more of it.

What to do with your own clients

List them by channel. Every client from the last six months, with a note: broker or direct.

Count unbilled hours per 10 billed. Search, proposal, contract, invoices, chasing, calls nobody paid for. If you never tracked them, estimate this month and start tracking from the next.

Compute the effective rate. Rate times 10, over 10 plus the unbilled hours. Put the floor next to it.

Work out the threshold before the next offer. Your best direct client’s effective rate is the number a broker offer has to match. Your worst direct client’s is the number it only has to beat.

Change the client, not the channel. A direct client above the threshold is not a reason to go back to brokers. It is a reason to re-scope, charge for the admin, or raise the rate at renewal, the same moves as for any client under the floor.

Where CronLoom comes in

CronLoom has no broker or channel feature and does no invoicing. It tracks time per client and project, and that is enough for this.

Treat a broker engagement as a client like any other. Log the search, the proposal, the contract work, the invoicing and the chasing on the client they belong to, marked non-billable. The effective rate per client in analytics is billed revenue over every completed hour on that client, billable or not, drawn against the floor you set. Utilization is the billable share of what you tracked. Broker and direct clients end up in the same list, ranked by what they really pay.

The effective hourly rate calculator does one client by hand: earnings, billable hours, non-billable hours. If you want the rate running for every client while the hours happen, join the waiting list.

Start with your last direct client

Take the last direct client you finished. Write down the fee, the billed hours, and every hour you spent getting, contracting, invoicing and chasing them. Divide.

Then put a broker offer at 95 next to it, at half an unbilled hour per 10, which pays 90. If your client’s number is higher, the direct work was worth the hours. If it is lower, the broker’s cut was the cheaper deal.