Freelance IT workers based in the city have crossed the £50 per hour pay mark for the first time in nearly five years, new research from the Association of Technology Staffing Companies (Atsco) has revealed.

According to the research from Atsco and iProfileStats, city IT contractors earnt an average of £54 per hour at the peak of the dot-com boom in 2000. However, by 2002 this figure had almost halved as freelancers were faced with average rates of less than £35 per hour.

But now temporary staff in the technology sector are enjoying average pay rates of £50 per hour. Atsco said this jump is due to an uptake in security and compliance-based IT projects among firms, as well as bigger profits in the city last year.

Atsco is not the only firm predicting rosier times for IT freelancers.

Earlier this month, contractor specialist Giant Group revealed that almost three-quarters of IT temps expect their pay to increase over the next year. Furthermore only three percent of the 2,500 respondents said they currently go for more than 90 days before finding another term of employment, down from 13 percent when a similar study was carried out in 2004.

Giant partly attributed the increased confidence in the sector to a rise in mergers and acquisitions, which means a need for extra IT staff to help link the two parties’ systems.