I received an offer for an internship and I would like to negotiate my salary. They are offering $50/hour but without any benefits like housing or meals. I’d like to get $55/hour to compensate for that. Any tips on the negotiation?
Thanks
No tip except to ask. But $50/hour should be plenty. That is $8,000/month. Surely you can cover your expenses for that. Interns honestly provide minimal value for companies. By the time they train you to do anything remotely worth $50 per hour in their environment, it is time for you to leave.
Wow. I consider that a very generous salary. Are you an undergrad? I would say thank you and accept that rate.
What kind of intern is that? I think they have already considered everything with that amount.
Just try and ask ahead. You’ll never know unless you ask them though of course it might become an hindrance for them to hire you as their intern. Nevertheless they might actually see it on another perspective.
Your quibbling over 55 vs 50 bucks an hr for an internship? Most people don’t get paid that for a regular job.
The tine to be negotiating over salary is for a fulltime job.
I’m in my junior year of my undergrad. $50 to $55 is over $3000 for the entire internship, so it is not chump change.
$50 an hour…trust me, they have already considered your living expenses and the like in that amount.
I’m not sure internships are negotiable so much as take or leave. These programs are kind of half favor/half marketing for these companies.
I think u are missing the whole point of an internship. The objective is for you to have a 3-month audition for a fulltime job, not for you to save for your retirement.
Are you prepared to walk if they don’t give you $55?
And, BTW, my law students work for free.
Seriously? Why are you entitled to anything? That is a HUGE rate for an intern. Many work for nothing or credit hours.
So I’m going to assume you’re in cs/software engineering.
Yes, you should negotiate. It’s not a matter of being ungrateful: like with all negotiations, it’s about getting fair market compensation, and typically offers that high DO also come with fully covered housing, free meals, etc. Pinterest, Yelp, etc, all pay upwards of 55/hr AND cover housing, etc.
I think it’s totally fair. Thank them for the offer, present some facts, and express your concerns about the offer being competitive without any cost-of-living benefits. COL is often extremely high in all metro areas offering these kinds of high paying internships, so you should be concerned, and the bottom line here – whether the other posters in other industries are aware of it or not – is that extremely high wages in addition to housing/relocation stipends are commonplace for interns. This employer should know that, and is likely aware that their offer is sub-par to others.
Imo, negotiate.
On a related note, if you have the technical skills to pull a $50/hr internship, you probably have the technical skills to pull a $55/hr + additional nice perks internship. I would start looking for one. Tech companies only really open up for negotiations when you have offers from their competitors (and then it’s a lovely bidding war).
Source: gone through this myself.
That might not be a really good idea. other people don’t even get paid doing an internship. I think it’s best you simply grab the opportunity and make the most out of what you get.
Or maybe you should just listen to them 
lol.
To those saying that the OP should just count his blessings, I think you are failing to see the big picture. $50/hr is a lot, yes, but that figure means that the OP is highly desired as an intern and, likely, as a FT employee. Negotiating this rate can be seen as negotiating starting salary - perhaps the job he is interning for would extrapolate that rate for FT work after graduation. In that case, the $5.00/hr translates to $10,000/yr in salary.
The risk of the company rescinding their offer is essentially nil; let’s explore why.
In order to justify paying an intern >$24,000, there was certainly an intensive hiring process. To give an idea here, let’s take some basic numbers… let’s say the company recruited at 25 universities; between information sessions and initial interviews, it probably took 3 days and required 3 employees, of which only 1 is in HR (i.e. 2 would otherwise be in a revenue generating position). Assuming salaries of $100,000 on average (for simplicity) and typical revenue of 2x salary for each non-HR employee, we are looking at a rough cost of $8,000 per university, including travel costs. Now we are talking about $200,000 spent on recruitment at 25 universities. Next think about second round interviews; let’s say that they invite 100 applicants to interview and, on average, it costs the company $500 per person to get the applicants to the interviews (flights/train, hotel, meals). Assume that each applicant has 3 hours of interviews and again assume that each hour costs around $200 in lost revenue, bringing the second round cost to $1,100 per applicant or $110,000 in total. The running total cost of recruitment is now $310,000. Assuming that they want an intern class of 50, we now have a hiring cost of $6,200 per intern.
The company had 100 people it believed were qualified for the job after interviewing upwards of 1,000 at all of the universities… they probably did a pretty good job there, so on the super day, only 10 were eliminated. This now means they have a viable applicant pool of 90. We can assume that because the initial offer was for $50/hr, market conditions favor employees, so the company can reasonably predict that it is competing, and that all 90 of the viable applicants will have gotten offers from at least SOME company, but they may not know exactly what those offers look like. The company makes offers to their top 50; 20 immediately accept and 20 immediately decline because they dreamed of working at another company, who gave them competitive offers, so the company goes to their first 20 backups, leaving 30 in reserve. After consideration, another 10 decide to accept other offers and 10 decide to accept the company’s offer, so the company goes to its next 10 backups, but 5 had already accepted other offers. Now in our hypothetical, there are still 20 people with outstanding offers and only 5 people identified as viable backups.
Now let’s get back to this idea that negotiation is a recipe for disaster for applicants. Suppose, under the above circumstance, the company decided to rescind its offer once the OP asked for $5.00/hr more. It now still needs to fill the OP’s spot, but chances are good that the company will wind up with no remaining backup applicants, so it will need to spend additional money to get new applicants to fill out the class. It would use a different strategy, but in order to maintain standards, it would still likely cost at least $2,000 per intern to go through that whole process again.
Suddenly, it becomes very expensive to make a blanket policy of rescinding offers to applicants who negotiate. And that is not to mention the fact that the people who tried to negotiate will inevitably tell their peers, who would be just a little less likely to apply. From there, your shrinking applicant pool means that you lose out on talented people and opportunities for long term revenue growth, and that decision seems even less rational.
Obviously my numbers are made up since I don’t know what company the OP is talking about, but they are in the right ballpark for a mid- to large- size company recruiting interns it is willing to pay $50.00/hr. Asking for 10% more is a completely reasonable idea and is not one that would result in the loss of the opportunity. In reality, the worst that will happen is that the company says, simply, “We have a standard wage of $50/hr for all interns, so unfortunately we don’t have room to negotiate.” If that happens, then at least you tried.
Unless the OP has another bird in the hand that he/she intends to take if Company X doesn’t give $55/hr instead of $50/hr, or the OP already has some proven SCARCE, must-have killer skill/achievement, then OP is being a penny-wise and a pound-foolish.
An internship is an AUDITION. It’s a platform to display your value, not be a jerk. A full-time job offer at the end of an internship is NOT a default. I’ve done an internship together with other students who were not offered a job. Negotiation on salary comes when Company X offers the OP a full-time job.
Tempemom not paying interns is generally considered illegal . OP why not ask you really have nothing to lose. You could also ask that the company provide free corporate housing which is done sometimes
What @gmt007 said…very few interns have a skill worth even half that much. It is not really a “job”. Use the audition wisely.
A little update. I did try to negotiate, but they won’t increase my wage. I decided to decline their offer.