Cost of hiring remote developers
Built on published government earnings data, not vendor estimates. Every figure on this page names the survey it came from.
A mid-level software developer in the United States has a median wage of $135,980 a year (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025). US employers pay a further 47.7% on top of wages in benefits and payroll taxes for professional occupations (BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026), which puts the real employer cost near $16,700 a month. The same role in the UK sits at a £56,914 median (ONS ASHE 2025) and in Australia at A$139,776 (ABS, May 2025).
A dedicated developer through TechTeamsOnline costs $1,800 to $3,200 a month by seniority, and that figure is the full cost — there is no recruitment fee, benefit load or office overhead underneath it. The calculator below puts your own team shape against whichever market you are hiring in today. If you would rather read the numbers than model them, the market-by-market table and the methodology are further down.
Model your team
Seniority maps to the 25th percentile, median and 75th percentile of the official earnings distribution for the occupation. Those are earnings percentiles, not a seniority survey, and are used here as a documented proxy.
The ABS publishes a group average for ANZSCO 261 rather than a percentile split, so the same Australian benchmark is applied at every seniority level. Australian payroll tax is levied by state and is excluded here; the 12% superannuation guarantee is included.
The benchmark side is a market average, not a quote for any individual you would hire.
What a developer costs, market by market
These are the published national figures for the occupation most comparable to a working software developer. They are gross annual wages, before the employer on-costs covered in the next section. Currency conversions are applied at the rate used in the source workbook.
| Market | 25th pct | Median | 75th pct | Employer load |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States Software Developers, SOC 15-1252 |
$105,210 | $135,980 | $171,980 | 47.7% |
| United Kingdom Programmers & software development, SOC 2134 |
£42,289 | £56,914 | £71,126 | ~16% |
| Australia Business/systems analysts & programmers, ANZSCO 261 |
not published | A$139,776 group average |
not published | 12% super |
The Australian row is deliberately incomplete. The ABS publishes an average weekly figure for the occupation group and no percentile breakdown, so there is nothing honest to put in those two cells.
The number most cost comparisons leave out
Salary is not what an employee costs. On top of wages, US private-sector employers pay 42.98% in benefits and payroll taxes, and for professional and related occupations the figure is 47.7% (BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026, USDL-26-0827). The load rises with seniority rather than falling, which undercuts the common assumption that offshoring only pays for junior roles.
Health cover is the single heaviest line in the US. Employer-sponsored family premiums averaged $26,993 in 2025, of which the employer paid roughly $20,143 (KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey, October 2025). That one line item is larger than the entire annual salary of many engineers in other markets.
The load is not uniform across countries and it is a mistake to reuse the US number elsewhere. A UK employer pays 15% secondary National Insurance above the £5,000 threshold plus a 3% pension minimum, which works out near 16% on a median salary. An Australian employer pays the 12% superannuation guarantee plus state payroll tax. An Indian employer's statutory obligations are provident fund capped at ₹1,800 a month, a 0.5% insurance levy, and gratuity accruing at fifteen days' wages a year — and those sit inside the quoted cost rather than on top of it.
What India actually costs, and why the published numbers disagree
Ask three sources what an Indian software engineer earns and you get three answers an order of magnitude apart. AmbitionBox, drawing on about 690,000 self-reported salaries, puts the average software engineer package at roughly ₹9.6 lakh, near $10,063. Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey gives an India back-end median of $22,086. Levels.fyi reports about $31,432.
None of them is lying; they are sampling different populations. Stack Overflow's Indian respondents skew student and early-career, which drags the figure down. Levels.fyi is fed by people at Airbnb, Broadcom and Atlassian reporting large packages, which pulls it up by roughly three times the AmbitionBox average for the same job title. Against the US median of $135,980 that is a gap of anywhere between four and thirteen times, depending entirely on which Indian population you compare against.
This is why we publish a range with the sampling attached rather than a single multiplier. A vendor quoting one clean number has picked whichever population flatters the pitch. If you are building a budget, the number you want is not the market average at all — it is the quoted rate, which for us is on the rate card and does not move with the survey of the month.
Where to hire, and where each channel breaks
There are three realistic routes to a remote developer and they fail in different ways. Knowing the failure mode matters more than the headline rate.
Freelance marketplaces
Cheapest per hour and fastest to start. They work well for a bounded piece of work with a clear finish: a migration, an integration, a fixed feature. Where they break is continuity. Your freelancer is running three other engagements, the good ones raise rates or leave, and nobody holds the context of your codebase after they go. Budget for the handover you will eventually pay for.
Direct hire in-country
Best for a role that must be embedded, on your payroll, with full institutional knowledge. The costs that surprise people are the ones outside the salary: recruitment averaged $5,475 per non-executive hire in 2025 (SHRM Benchmarking Reports, October 2025), the benefit load above, and a time-to-hire measured in months. It is the right answer for a founding engineer and an expensive one for a fourth React developer.
Dedicated remote team
A developer who works only on your product, employed elsewhere. You get continuity without the employment overhead, and the rate is the whole cost. Where this breaks is management: a dedicated developer with no clear owner on your side drifts exactly as an in-house one would. It also breaks if you need someone physically present, or in your time zone without a shift arrangement. That is the model we run, and those are its real limits.
What to screen for before you commit budget
The spread inside any labour market is wider than the spread between markets, so the vetting is what you are actually buying. Structured interviews remain the best-supported selection method in the published research, which in practice means asking every candidate the same questions against the same rubric rather than running a conversation.
Ask to see code the person wrote for production and have them walk you through a decision they would now make differently. Give a small, paid, time-boxed task on something close to your actual stack rather than a puzzle. Check that they can read an unfamiliar codebase before changing it, because most of the job is that and almost no interview tests it.
Then screen the arrangement, not just the person: who replaces them if it does not work, how long that takes, who owns the code and the IP, and what the notice period is. A cheap rate attached to a three-month replacement gap is not cheap.
How to build the budget, step by step
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1. Write down the roles, not the headcount
Two mid-level backend developers and a QA engineer is a budget. "Three developers" is not, because the three could differ by a factor of two.
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2. Price the in-house option honestly
Take the median for your market from the table above, add your country's employer load, then add recruitment cost spread over expected tenure. That is the number to compare against, not the bare salary.
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3. Decide the overlap you actually need
Full US Eastern coverage needs a night shift in India and usually costs more than a standard day. If four hours is enough, say so, and do not pay for coverage you will not use.
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4. Add your own management time
Every engagement model needs someone on your side who owns priorities and reviews the work. Put a number on that. It is the cost most comparisons quietly omit.
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5. Budget the exit
Replacement time, handover, and the documentation you will want if someone leaves. If a vendor cannot tell you their replacement timeline, that is the answer.
What moves the number up or down
Shift. A standard Indian day of 09:30 to 18:30 IST overlaps the Gulf almost completely, the UK by four to five hours, Sydney by three, and US Eastern by nothing at all. A full US Eastern business day requires an 18:30 to 03:30 IST shift, and a night shift carries a premium in any labour market.
Seniority. The gap between an associate and a senior is larger in absolute terms than most people expect, because the employer load in high-cost markets rises with pay rather than staying flat.
Scarcity of the specific skill. A React developer and a Kubernetes engineer are not the same market. Specialist infrastructure, data engineering and machine-learning roles price above general application development everywhere, India included.
Salary inflation. Indian salaries rose 8.9% in 2025 with 9.1% projected for 2026 (Aon; Deloitte India agrees at 9.1%). Any multi-year budget built on today's rate without an increment assumption will be wrong by the second year.
Methodology and caveats
US wages come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for May 2025, release USDL-26-0725, published 15 May 2026, covering 1,687,890 employed software developers. UK wages come from the Office for National Statistics Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025, Table 14.7a, released 23 October 2025; these are provisional and a revised dataset is expected in late 2026. Australian wages come from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Employee Earnings and Hours for May 2025, catalogue 6306.0, on the full-time non-managerial adult-rate basis.
Employer on-costs come from the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation for March 2026, release USDL-26-0827, and from the KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey published 22 October 2025. Indian salary ranges are self-reported and are presented as a spread for that reason.
Two limits worth stating plainly. Occupational averages are not job offers, and any individual hire can sit well outside the percentile band for reasons no national survey captures. And salary data decays quickly: these figures were current as of July 2026, and the ONS release in particular is provisional. Check the release dates above before carrying any of these numbers into a plan that has to survive a year.
Common questions about remote developer costs
How much does it cost to hire a remote developer?
It depends far more on where you are hiring from than on the developer. A mid-level software developer in the United States sits at a median of $135,980 a year before benefits (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025). Add the 47.7% that US employers pay on top of wages for professional occupations in benefits and payroll taxes (BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026) and the employer cost is roughly $16,700 a month. A dedicated developer through TechTeamsOnline is $1,800 to $3,200 a month depending on seniority, and that rate is the full cost.
What does a five-person remote development team cost?
Using our published rates, five mid-level developers are $12,500 a month. The comparison figure depends entirely on which market you are comparing against, which is why the calculator asks. Against the US median plus employer load it is roughly $83,700 a month for the same five people; against the UK median it is closer to $36,800. We publish the arithmetic rather than a single savings percentage because the percentage changes by market, seniority and role.
Why do you show government data instead of a simple savings percentage?
Because a savings percentage with no source behind it does not survive a finance review. The headline percentages that circulate in this industry generally trace back to nothing you can check, and a prospect who fact-checks one figure and finds it invented discounts the whole page. Every benchmark here names its survey, its release number and its publication date, so you can verify it before you put it in a budget.
Are these salary figures the same as what a developer takes home?
No, and the difference matters. The government figures here are gross wages. What an employer actually spends is higher: US private-sector benefits and payroll taxes add 42.98% on average and 47.7% for professional occupations, and employer health premiums alone averaged about $20,143 a year for family coverage in 2025 (KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey). The UK figure is lighter at roughly 16%, because the NHS removes the health-premium line. Comparing a quoted monthly rate against a bare salary understates the gap.
What is the cost of hiring remote developers in India specifically?
Published India figures vary by an order of magnitude depending on who was surveyed, so treat any single number with suspicion. AmbitionBox puts the average software engineer CTC at about ₹9.6 lakh, roughly $10,063, across a 690,000-response sample. Stack Overflow's 2025 survey puts the India back-end median at $22,086, but its India sample skews student and junior. Levels.fyi reports a median of about $31,432, drawn from big-tech and captive-centre reporting. The honest statement is a range with the sampling attached, not one figure.
Are there costs on top of the monthly rate?
No recruitment fee, no benefit administration, no office overhead, and no visa cost, because the developer is employed in India and works remotely. The rate shown is what you pay. What the rate does not cover is your own management time, which is a real cost on any engagement and one worth budgeting for honestly.
Does a cheaper rate mean a less experienced developer?
It means a different labour market, not a different capability tier. The gap between a US median and an Indian median is a cost-of-living and currency gap, and it holds across seniority. That said, the spread inside India is wide, so what you are actually buying is the vetting. Ask what was tested and how, and ask to see the work.
How does the time-zone difference affect what I should budget?
It affects the shift, and the shift can affect the rate. A standard Indian working day of 09:30 to 18:30 IST gives a full overlap with the Gulf, four to five hours with the UK, three with Sydney, and no overlap at all with US Eastern. Covering a full US Eastern business day means an 18:30 to 03:30 IST shift. Any vendor quoting casual US overlap on a normal India shift is describing something that does not exist.
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