Most advice on "hiring a freelancer" is written for American tech startups by American tech startups. The practical details — VAT, Revenue registration, preferred payment methods, what an Irish contract usually looks like — are different in Ireland, and those details are where most first-time buyers get burned.
This is the short version: a sequence we'd want a friend hiring their first freelancer to follow. It's specifically written for a one-off or occasional hire (a logo, a website, a launch video, a SEO audit, a translation). If you're hiring continuously — recurring content, ongoing dev — the calculus changes and an agency retainer often beats freelance procurement.
1. Write the brief before you reach out
The single biggest source of pain in Irish freelance hiring is not writing the brief first. A brief doesn't need to be long — a page is often enough — but it does need to contain the four things without which no honest freelancer can give you a real quote:
- Outcome. What does "done" look like? A logo file set? A working checkout? Three ranked articles? Describe the end state, not the process.
- Deliverables. File formats, page counts, word counts, revisions allowed. The things you can tick off a list.
- Deadline. A real one. "Before the launch on 12 June" is useful. "ASAP" is not.
- Budget range. Yes, tell the freelancer your budget. You're not tipping your hand — you're letting them tell you honestly whether they can do the job at that price. Freelancers asked to quote with no budget signal will almost always guess high.
If you can't write all four, you're not ready to hire yet — you're still scoping. Talk to us about the shortlist service and we'll help you turn a rough need into a brief, before we introduce you to anyone.
2. Work out the right kind of freelancer
One of the most common mistakes is hiring a specialist when you need a generalist, or vice versa. A rough decision tree:
- A clearly-scoped single output (a logo, a specific page, a single article) — hire a specialist freelancer.
- A small build with 2–3 disciplines (copy + design + basic dev for a landing page) — hire a generalist freelancer, or a freelance design-developer pairing who work together regularly.
- A project with 4+ disciplines or long-running (full rebrand, ongoing content, multi-page site with CMS) — usually cheaper through a small agency or an established freelance collective than coordinating four separate freelancers yourself.
We cover this distinction in more detail in Freelancer or agency — what's right for your project?
3. Benchmark the rate before you ask
Know what a fair Irish day rate looks like for the discipline you're hiring in. This is the fastest single thing you can do to avoid being overcharged and avoid getting quotes so low the freelancer can't actually do the work.
Our Irish rate benchmark is on the rates page. Use the ranges, not the averages. A junior designer at €280 a day and a senior designer at €850 a day aren't the same service under different names — they are actually different services. You want the rate tier that matches the complexity of the work, not the cheapest.
A good rule of thumb: if three quotes come back and the cheapest is less than two-thirds of the others, take the cheapest one out of the running. Not because low price is bad — because a big outlier nearly always means the freelancer has read the brief differently to everyone else.
4. Check credentials (briefly)
You're not running a background check. You're doing a ten-minute sanity pass.
- CRO lookup if they're trading as a limited company — cro.ie is free. Confirm the company exists, is not struck off, and the registered trading name matches what's on their invoice.
- Revenue / VAT status. If they're going to charge you VAT (they will if they're VAT-registered and you're not a VAT-registered business) make sure the VAT number on their invoice is real. You can verify Irish VAT numbers via the EU VIES lookup.
- Portfolio sanity check. Two or three recent pieces they'll talk specifically about, not a case-studies page they inherited. The quality of the talk beats the quality of the portfolio screenshot every time.
- One reference. One former client they're happy to be emailed about. Don't ask for three, ask for one — freelancers hand-pick anyway, so extras don't tell you much.
5. Get quotes in writing, not DMs
Ireland doesn't require a written contract for most freelance work to be enforceable, but it will save you every time something goes wrong. The minimum viable quote covers:
- Scope (what's in, what's out).
- Deliverables (file formats, versions, revisions included).
- Timeline with milestone dates.
- Price (excluding VAT if applicable, shown clearly).
- Payment terms (deposit %, milestone %, final %, and when each is due).
- IP / usage rights (who owns the work once paid — default in Ireland is that the freelancer owns copyright until the contract says otherwise).
For anything over €3,000 of work, get a short contract or letter of engagement as well. Most Irish freelancers have one and will send it with the quote.
6. Pay a deposit, pay the rest on acceptance
Standard Irish freelance structure is 30–50% deposit on brief confirmation, balance on delivery. For longer projects, milestone payments tied to deliverables (design sign-off, dev complete, go-live) are normal.
- Preferred payment method: SEPA bank transfer is cheapest and fastest between Irish accounts. Revolut and Wise work fine for smaller amounts. Avoid PayPal unless the freelancer asks specifically — fees eat 4%+ of the transaction.
- Keep the receipt. A proper VAT invoice is required if you want to reclaim VAT or deduct the cost against business income.
7. Final acceptance, and file handover
The last step most first-time buyers skip: make sure you get the source files, not just the exports. A designer giving you a PNG logo and no AI/SVG is giving you half the product. A web developer giving you an admin login but not the git repo is doing the same. Ask for source files in the brief and verify they've landed before you release the final payment.
Want us to shortlist Irish freelancers for your brief?
If all of that is more work than you want to do, the matched-quotes form on the homepage is our shortlist service. Tell us what you're after, and we'll introduce you to two or three Irish freelancers whose rate and availability fit. No booking fee, no marketing, no reselling your brief.