Kim Ellis, founder of L&D Free Spirits, shares everything you need to know about the 2026 L&D Freelancer Insight Survey. What the data showed last year, why this survey exists in the first place, and why she’d love you to take ten minutes to fill it in this June.
Two years ago, I sent a survey out into the void.
Our LinkedIn page was barely a month old. The mailing list was tiny. I had no idea if anyone would bother. Twenty-five people did, and that felt awesome.
Fast forward to 2025 and 77 people completed it. Most were from the UK, but people answered from Spain, Hong Kong, India, South Africa, Thailand, Brazil, the UAE… the list goes on. People I’d never met, filling in a survey about their freelance life.
This year’s L&D Freelancer Insight Survey is open from Monday 1st June until Friday 26th June, and with your help, it would be awesome if we could double or even triple the numbers again.
Why does this survey exist?
Because nobody else is doing it for us freelancers.
There are plenty of reports about the L&D industry. Big consultancies, trade bodies, the occasional think tank. But self-employed people development professionals? Freelance trainers, coaches, OD consultants, learning designers working for themselves? We tend to get lumped in with everyone else or left out altogether.
How often do you complete a survey and hit a question like ‘how many people are in your organisation?’ or ‘what’s your annual spending budget?’ Those surveys aren’t built for us.
This one is!
And the findings go back to the community. Full stop. The data exists to help people, not to sell to them. And the longer we run it, the more useful it gets, because we’re building a real picture of what freelance life looks like year on year.
What did last year’s data tell us?
Quite a lot, as it turns out.
The headline that got the most reaction: finding work is getting harder. Over half of respondents (51%) scored it 5 or lower when asked how easy they found securing clients. That’s a big number. And it didn’t really surprise anyone who’d lived through 2024.
At the same time, client satisfaction was through the roof. 100% of respondents rated it 9 or 10. So people aren’t struggling because they’re doing bad work. They’re struggling to find the work in the first place.
Rate confidence was another interesting one.
Only 57% said they were happy with what they charged, down from 80% the year before.
That’s a significant dip. And it sits alongside the fact that more people than ever are charging £1,000+ a day, so the picture is genuinely mixed. Some are commanding premium rates and owning it. Others are still not quite sure they’re worth what they’re asking.
Referrals became the number one way people found work in 2025, which is both reassuring and a little bit double-edged. It means the quality of the work is speaking for itself. It also means a lot of people are relying on networks they’ve already built, which is fine until it isn’t.
And almost nobody wants to go back to employment. 91% scored that 5 or lower.
People aren’t freelancing reluctantly or as a stopgap. They’re committed. They just want more support.
So, what are we curious about in 2026?
We’ve got a few burning questions this year.
Will consultancy still dominate? In 2025 it came out as the most offered standalone service, and it tends to command the higher rates too. We want to know if that’s grown, or if people are diversifying.
Has the “stop charging day rates” message landed? (We dedicated a fair chunk of Season 1 of the podcast to this.) In 2025, 40% of respondents still used a day rate as their primary model. Curious to see where that sits twelve months on.
And the big one: has finding work got any easier? Given everything that’s happening economically, we genuinely don’t know what the data will show.
And that’s the point of running the survey each year. We need to know what you’re winning at and where you’re struggling.
Who’s this survey for?
Anyone who’s self-employed in the people development space. That means trainers, facilitators, coaches, learning designers, OD consultants, instructional designers, learning technologists… if you work for yourself in this world, this is your survey.
You don’t have to be a Free Spirits member. You don’t have to be based in the UK. You just have to be doing your own thing in people development and willing to spend ten minutes telling us what that’s actually like right now.
The results will be published in August, and as always, the full report will be freely available (but we will ask for your email address).
(Open 1st–26th June 2026)
And if you want to be part of a community that takes this stuff seriously year-round, not just when the survey’s open, come and have a nosey at L&D Free Spirits. We’ve got peer networking, live events, practical resources, and a group of people who genuinely get what it’s like to be doing this on your own.
