27/09/2026
It’s must be great being self employed, working for yourself and having time off when you want it they say. The reality is very different.
On top of the pay issues listed below you also have all the costs of running your own business to find, insurance, Service & repairs not to mention buying a van in the first place and having the funds to replace it with another 3-4 years later and people always forgets the tax man still takes a big share of the income.
Don’t forget all those hours that one has to put in answering calls & messages all times of day and night on everyday, putting advertising up keeping up with accounts, and driving to & from jobs, and all the rest of the unpaid work we do.
I often get told…
I wish I got paid that for an hour work….
I WISH WE KEPT ALL THAT MONEY and if only it was just the 1 hour of work that you see me do !!
Going self-employed gets sold as pure upside. No boss, no commute, no ceiling on what you can earn. All true. What almost nobody spells out is the value of everything you quietly stop receiving the day you stop being someone's employee, because none of it arrives as a bill. It just stops turning up.
Here is what disappears. Statutory Sick Pay, now paid from the very first day of illness at £123.25 a week, or 80% of average earnings if lower. As an employee that is automatic. As a sole trader, it simply does not exist, full stop. Fall ill for a month with no clients and no income, and there is no employer quietly covering that gap while you recover.
Then there is your pension. Every employer in the UK is legally required to contribute a minimum of 3% of your qualifying earnings into a workplace pension, on top of your salary, whether you think about it or not. On a £30,000 income, that is worth around £713 a year, paid in by someone else, every single year you are employed. Self-employed, that contribution has to come from you, if it happens at all.
Add statutory holiday. Employees are legally entitled to 28 days of paid leave a year. Self-employed, every single day off is a day of zero income, whether that is a holiday, a sick day, or simply Christmas.
Add it up on a modest £30,000 income and you are looking at over £2,000 a year in value that employment quietly provided and self-employment simply does not, before tax, before software, before a single invoice goes unpaid. None of this means self-employment is a mistake. It means pricing your time and your rates as if that safety net genuinely does not exist, because it does not.
