All skills  /  Web Development

Hire a Freelance PHP Developer

PHP still runs an enormous share of the commercial web, which means most freelance PHP work is inheritance: an application that works, earns money, and needs someone who can change it safely. Modern PHP 8 with a framework is a different job from maintaining a decade-old custom system, and it pays to be explicit about which you have.

What a freelance PHP Developer actually does

These are the engagements that come up most often. If your project does not resemble any of them, say so explicitly in your brief — it usually means you need an adjacent skill instead.

• Maintain and extend existing custom PHP applications
• Upgrade legacy PHP 5/7 codebases to PHP 8 and fix what breaks
• Build APIs and admin panels in Laravel, Symfony, or plain modern PHP
• Fix SQL injection, session, and file-upload vulnerabilities in older code
• Optimise slow pages: query profiling, caching, and N+1 elimination

What it costs in 2026

Hourly ranges seen across global freelance marketplaces. Use them to sanity-check a quote rather than as a target — a well-specified project frequently costs less at a higher hourly rate than a vague one does at a lower rate.

Fixed-price quotes are usually the better structure for work you can describe precisely. Hourly is safer when the scope will genuinely change as you learn — but agree a cap in writing either way.

Tools and technologies to expect

You do not need to understand these. You do need to see them appear naturally in a candidate's answers rather than only in their profile keywords.

Before you hire: a short checklist

Most bad freelance outcomes are decided before any work starts. These four checks catch the majority of them.

1. 1 Be explicit about whether your codebase is legacy or modern — they are different hires.
2. 2 Ask how they approach a codebase with no tests, because that is what you probably have.
3. 3 Check security habits: prepared statements, escaping, upload validation.
4. 4 Confirm they use Composer and version control rather than editing files over FTP.

Questions worth asking in the interview

You are not testing whether you can follow the answer. You are testing whether the answer is specific, whether it comes from experience, and whether they are comfortable saying "it depends" and explaining on what.

Warning signs

None of these are automatically disqualifying, but each one deserves a direct question before you commit money.

• Still writes mysql_* style code or concatenates SQL
• Edits production files directly
• Recommends a rewrite before understanding the business logic

Web Development services available now

Listings currently published in this category on AMFreelance.

Frequently asked questions

Related skills

Projects described as needing a PHP Developer often turn out to need one of these instead, or as well.