Every number on this page came from somewhere else. I read each one, I name who published it, and I date it, because a rate you cannot source is a rate you cannot defend.
The sources disagree, and that is the point. For one job title, in one country, in one week, the published figures for a product designer run from about $119,000 to about $208,000. Nobody is lying. They are counting different things. One counts base wage. One counts what employers advertise. One counts base plus stock plus bonus at companies that grant equity. When somebody tells you what the market pays, the first question is which of those they mean.
This is a citation index. It is not my data and I do not collect it. I do not ask any member what they charge, I do not hold it, and I do not circulate it. There is no recommended rate here and there never will be, because members are independent and what they charge is theirs.
How to read a figure
Base wage is what an employer puts on the offer letter. It excludes stock and bonus.
Total compensation adds the annual value of stock grants and bonus. At companies that grant equity it runs far above base, and the gap widens with seniority.
Advertised pay is scraped from job postings. It reflects what employers are willing to say in public, which is not always what they pay.
Self reported data comes from people submitting their own numbers. It skews toward the companies whose employees bother to submit, which are mostly the ones paying well.
Levels.fyi
Glassdoor
ZipRecruiter
Salary.com
Indeed
Motion Recruitment, 2026 Tech Salary Guide
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Contract and hourly rates
There is one named source and it covers one discipline.
The Editorial Freelancers Association publishes a rate chart built from a survey of its members run from November 2025 to mid January 2026, released 24 March 2026. It reports median hourly ranges cut by editorial service type. Read 13 August 2026 at https://www.the-efa.org/rates/.
For product design, engineering, product management and research, no named third party publishes contract hourly rates broken out by discipline and level. The staffing firms that place contract work publish salaries. The aggregators publish employee pay. Converting a salary into an hourly rate would produce a Pixel Syndicate number wearing somebody else's source, so this page does not do it.
If you want a defensible contract rate, the honest construction is your own: your target annual income, divided by the hours you can actually bill, grossed up for self employment tax, health cover, retirement, holiday and the weeks you spend selling rather than working. That arithmetic is yours and it is not on this page as a figure, because it is not a market figure.
The closing note
Update cadence: every figure on this page is re read from its source each quarter and re dated. Nothing carries forward on trust.
If a source starts charging for what it publishes free today, or stops publishing, it comes off this page rather than being quoted from memory.