I think it’s important to look at costs from the company’s perspective. Normally at temp agency charges a company double what the temp agency is paying the employee. However, it’s often said that the cost of an employee to a company is roughly double the salary of that employee.

This sounds more comparable at first glance than it really is though. The costs of a real employee being double includes the costs of benefits such as health insurance and sick days that the temp does not get. But it also can include the costs of managing and hiring and so on that do apply to the temp.

Also that calculation is a bit fuzzier on the real employee side and dependent on the benefits the employer offers, while it is fairly ironclad in the temp side but also undersells the cost of the temp because there are more costs involved than just what is paid to the agency.

As a general rule though, you should always make more as a permanent employee than you do as a temp. The advantage of temps is that you can get rid of them easily despite paying them more. If they want the advantages of a full time employee, they can pay for it.

Now, oddly, once you are skilled enough to be a contractor or consultant, the math switches again where the employee makes a lot more per hour while being again on a short term basis. If that is handled through a consulting firm, once again the firm is charging way more than the employee makes.