Research indicates that lack of fair compensation is one of the primary sources of dissatisfaction among freelance translators (Moorkens, 2020; Ruokonen & Svahn, 2024) and that rate-setting practices in the language services industry need to be improved collectively (Lambert & Walker, 2022), especially since the advent of neural machine translation (Vieira, 2020). In the 2024 edition of the European Language Industry Survey, for the first time in the history of the survey most freelance translators reported price drops, despite current inflation. Within this context, however, actual rates, pricing methods, and income satisfaction have received scant attention in translation research. In this article, we present the findings of an anonymous online survey on translation, revision and post-editing rates, pricing methods, and income satisfaction among freelancers based in two multilingual European markets, namely Belgium and Switzerland. The study confirms industry-wide trends of falling rates and reduced workloads due to AI. It reveals significant cross-country differences in pricing models and income satisfaction, with dissatisfaction mostly related to low rates rather than to pricing methods themselves. Despite structural concerns and uncertainty about AI’s impact, professional satisfaction remains relatively high, driven by the intrinsic appeal of translation-related work and freelance autonomy.