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Nearshore DevelopmentCost Calculator

Compare what a software engineer really costs four different ways: hired in-house in the United States, contracted through a US staffing agency, hired nearshore in Honduras, or contracted offshore in Poland.

Every assumption is yours to change. We cannot honestly tell you what your payroll costs, so we do not pretend to — we give you defaults anchored to public data, show our working, and let you overwrite all of it. The only fixed numbers on this page are our own rates.

Run the numbersRead the methodology

The four models

What each column actually means

A salary and an hourly rate are not comparable numbers. One is an annual commitment that carries taxes, benefits, equipment and idle time; the other is a price per hour of work delivered. The calculator converts everything to the same unit — dollars per hour of engineering you actually receive — so the comparison means something.

  • US in-house employee

    Base salary, plus employer burden, plus overhead, divided by the hours an employee actually delivers.

  • US contractor or staffing agency

    A straight hourly rate with no benefits or overhead on your books — and a markup you rarely get to see.

  • Nearshore Honduras (Codebrand)

    $45, $65 or $95 an hour by seniority, on US Central Time, billed only for hours worked.

  • Eastern Europe (Poland)

    An offshore agency rate at a comparable seniority, 6–9 hours ahead of US working hours.

The formula, in full

In-house cost per hour = (base salary × (1 + employer burden) + annual overhead) ÷ productive hours per year. The other three models are simply their hourly rate. Total cost for the engagement = cost per hour × developers × hours per week × (months × 52 ÷ 12). Nothing is hidden and nothing is weighted in our favour — you can reproduce every figure with a pocket calculator.

Methodology & assumptions

Where every default comes from

We are a nearshore vendor. You should read our cost comparison with that in mind, which is exactly why every input is editable and every default is documented below. Where a public dataset exists we name it and give its reference period. Where none exists, we say so and use a round number instead of a precise-looking one.

US base salary — anchored to BLS

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey reported a median annual wage of $133,080 for software developers (SOC 15-1252) in May 2024, with the 10th percentile at $79,850 and the 90th at $211,450. We default the senior figure to the median, rounded to $133,000, and place mid ($110,000) and lead ($170,000) at round points between the median and the tails. Those two are positions on a published distribution, not survey data about job titles — BLS does not publish by seniority. Source: BLS OEWS, Software Developers.

Employer burden — default 30%

The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for March 2026 put private industry total compensation at $46.60 per hour worked, of which wages and salaries were $32.60 (69.9%) and benefits $14.01 (30.1%). Expressed the way this calculator needs it — as a percentage added on top of wages — that is roughly 43%. We default to 30% instead, deliberately understating the in-house figure so the savings we show are conservative. If you want the full BLS-implied load, type 43 into the field. Source: BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation.

Overhead — a round $15,000 a year

This is an estimate, not a measurement. It is meant to cover a workstation, software licences and tooling seats, a share of facilities, HR and payroll administration, and recruiting amortised over the hire's tenure. Recruiting alone is not trivial: SHRM's benchmarking work put the average cost-per-hire at $4,129 (FY2015 data, published 2016). If your team is fully remote and you would rather not count overhead at all, set the field to zero and the comparison still works. Reference: SHRM benchmarking report on cost-per-hire.

Productive hours — 1,880 a year

52 weeks at 40 hours is 2,080 paid hours. Subtract 15 days of paid leave and 10 public holidays — 25 days, or 200 hours — and 1,880 remain. That is arithmetic, not a statistic, and you can verify it in one line. It is also generous to the in-house model: it counts every remaining hour as productive engineering, which no honest engineering manager believes. Lower the number if you want to account for meetings, interviews and internal work.

US contractor rate — round estimates, no source

There is no authoritative public dataset for what US staffing agencies bill, because rates are negotiated privately and vary enormously by market and by how much of the markup the agency keeps. We default to $80, $110 and $150 an hour by seniority as round placeholders and label them exactly that. If you have a real quote in your inbox, use it — this is the field where your own number is most likely to beat ours.

Poland rate — round estimates from vendor rate cards

The same problem, worse. Published Eastern European rates come almost entirely from agencies publishing their own price lists, which have an obvious incentive. Rather than cite a competitor's marketing as though it were data, we default to $50, $70 and $95 an hour by seniority and call them estimates. They are in the right neighbourhood for agency-billed work at these seniority levels; they are not a benchmark, and any real quote you hold should replace them.

The one thing we do assert

Codebrand's hourly rates — $45 for a mid developer, $65 for a senior, $95 for a lead or architect — are our published prices and are fixed in the calculator. Every other figure on this page is either sourced above or labelled an estimate. If you find an error in our arithmetic or a better public source for any default, tell us at info@codebrand.es and we will change it.

The arbitrage

Why the price gap exists at all

A senior engineer in San Pedro Sula and a senior engineer in Austin write the same TypeScript. The rate differs because software salaries are set by local labour markets and local costs of living, not by the market value of the software produced. Housing, healthcare, transport and taxation in Honduras cost a fraction of what they cost in a US metropolitan area, so a compensation package that is genuinely competitive locally converts into a lower dollar rate for you. That gap is structural, and it has been narrowing slowly for a decade as remote work globalised demand.

The second half of the gap is overhead you stop carrying. When you contract hours you do not pay payroll taxes, health insurance, retirement matching, paid leave, recruiting fees, equipment or severance — and you do not carry the risk of paying a salary during a quarter when the roadmap stalls. At this calculator's defaults, a senior on $133,000 with a 30% burden and $15,000 of overhead costs $99.95 for each of 1,880 productive hours, and $29.20 of that hour is load rather than wages. Our senior rate is $65, so the whole gap is $34.95 an hour and the load you stop carrying is $29.20 of it. The share moves with seniority: at lead level, where our $95 rate sits slightly above what the salary alone works out to per hour, the load you shed is the entire saving.

What makes nearshore different from offshore is not price, it is the clock. Honduras runs on US Central Time, so a question asked at 10am in Chicago is answered at 10am, not tomorrow. Eastern European teams are typically 6–9 hours ahead of US working hours, which is workable with discipline but turns every clarification into a day of latency. Over a long engagement that latency has a real cost, and it does not appear on any rate card — which is precisely why a calculator can never settle the decision on its own. Our dedicated development team model is built around that overlap.

The honest part

What you do not save

A cost calculator makes a decision look like arithmetic. It is not. Four costs survive the switch to nearshore completely intact, and any vendor who tells you otherwise is selling rather than advising.

  • Management still costs you

    Somebody has to write tickets, review work and make decisions. Outsourcing the typing does not outsource the thinking, and a team you manage badly is expensive at any rate.

  • Onboarding is not free

    Any new engineer, local or remote, spends weeks becoming useful. Short engagements pay that cost proportionally more often, which is why very short contracts rarely save what the arithmetic promises.

  • Quality is not a function of price

    There are excellent and terrible engineers at every rate in every country. A cheap hourly rate applied to the wrong person is the most expensive option on this page.

  • Turnover resets the meter

    Every replacement re-pays onboarding and loses context. Ask any vendor what their retention on client teams looks like — the answer tells you more about your real cost than the rate card does.

When in-house is still the right call

If the software is the company — the thing customers actually buy, the thing your valuation rests on — there is a strong argument for owning that knowledge permanently and in-house, whatever it costs. Deep product intuition compounds over years, and it compounds best inside people who are not going anywhere. No hourly saving compensates for losing that.

The same applies when a role carries responsibilities a vendor cannot hold: regulated sign-off, security clearance, physical presence, or accountability that has to sit with an employee. And it applies when your binding constraint is management attention rather than budget — adding engineers you have no capacity to direct makes delivery slower, not faster, and it does so at every price point.

Where nearshore genuinely wins is the middle ground: real, ongoing engineering demand that does not justify permanent headcount, or a roadmap that needs to move faster than your hiring pipeline can deliver. That is the case for hiring remote developers into a team you already run, or for a scoped internal build such as custom CRM development that will never be your core product but has to exist and has to be good.

Reuse

Cite this calculator

Free to use, free to quote, no permission needed. If you are writing about outsourcing costs, teaching a course, or building a budget deck, take the attribution line below. Tell your readers what assumptions you used — the numbers are only meaningful alongside them.

Attribution line

Codebrand, Nearshore Development Cost Calculator, https://www.codebrand.us/nearshore-cost-calculator

HTML snippet

<a href="https://www.codebrand.us/nearshore-cost-calculator">Nearshore Development Cost Calculator</a> by Codebrand

Found a mistake, or have a better public source for one of our defaults? Write to info@codebrand.es. We would rather be corrected than quoted wrongly.

Questions

Nearshore cost, answered

Codebrand bills nearshore engineers hourly: $45/hr for a mid developer, $65/hr for a senior developer, and $95/hr for a lead or architect. Those are our published rates, not estimates. A senior working a full 40-hour week is therefore $2,600 for that week, and you pay only for hours actually worked — no retainer, no benefits load, no severance exposure. Rates elsewhere in Latin America vary widely by country and by whether you are buying from an agency or contracting an individual directly.
Usually, but by less than most vendor marketing claims. The honest comparison is not salary against hourly rate — it is fully loaded cost against hourly rate. Once you add employer burden, overhead and the fact that a salaried employee does not deliver 2,080 billable hours a year, this calculator's default assumptions put a US in-house developer at roughly $84 to $126 an hour of real engineering time, depending on seniority. Against that, our rates of $45, $65 and $95 work out to savings of about 46%, 35% and 24% respectively. Those are outputs of our defaults, not market observations — change the inputs and the savings change with them.
Three things sit on top of base salary. First, employer burden: payroll taxes, health insurance, retirement contributions, paid leave and supplemental pay. The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation series put benefits at 30.1% of total compensation for private-industry workers in March 2026, which is roughly 43% on top of wages. Second, overhead: equipment, software licences, facilities, HR administration and recruiting. Third, unproductive paid time. The calculator lets you set all three.
Nearshore means a country close to your own with substantial working-hour overlap. For a US company that is Latin America — Codebrand works from San Pedro Sula, Honduras, on US Central Time, so the overlap is a full working day. Offshore means a distant time zone: Eastern Europe is 6–9 hours ahead of the US, and South and Southeast Asia further still. Offshore rates can be lower, but you trade same-day review cycles for overnight handoffs, which slows anything that needs conversation.
Because Poland is the realistic alternative for the buyer this calculator is written for. Companies weighing a nearshore team in Latin America against an offshore option are usually comparing engineering cultures with similar seniority and English levels, and Central and Eastern Europe is the most common competitor in that bracket. Lower-cost offshore markets exist and their published rates are genuinely lower — but the comparison then turns on time-zone overlap and communication overhead more than on price, which a cost calculator cannot honestly model.
No. Only Codebrand's hourly rates are firm. The default US salary, employer burden, overhead, contractor rate and Poland rate are market estimates you can and should overwrite with your own figures. Nothing on this page is an offer, and a real engagement is scoped and priced after we understand your product. If you want an actual quote, send us the configuration from the calculator by WhatsApp or email and we will price it properly.
Several, and they matter. It does not model management time on your side, onboarding and ramp-up, contractor turnover, currency and payment fees, legal and compliance work, or the cost of a hire that does not work out. It also does not model the value of speed — shipping a quarter earlier is often worth more than the entire rate difference. Treat the output as a budgeting floor for the labour line, not as total cost of ownership.
A full-time year is 2,080 paid hours, but nobody delivers 2,080 hours of engineering. Subtract paid leave, public holidays and sick days and you are near 1,880. The calculator defaults to that figure because it is simple arithmetic you can verify. If you want a stricter number you can subtract meetings, interviews and internal work as well — set the field lower and every in-house figure on the page adjusts.
When the work is your core product differentiator and you want the knowledge to compound inside your company permanently. When you need someone physically present, or holding regulated responsibilities that a vendor cannot hold. When the role is genuinely permanent and full-time for years, so recruiting cost amortises away. And when your engineering organisation is strong enough that management capacity, not budget, is the real constraint. Cost is one input to that decision and rarely the deciding one.
Yes, freely, and you do not need to ask. There is a citation block on this page with a ready-made attribution line and an HTML snippet you can copy. If you publish an analysis that uses different assumptions from ours we would genuinely like to see it — write to info@codebrand.es and we will look at whether our defaults should change.

Want the real number for your roadmap?

Send us the configuration you landed on and we will price it properly — scoped to your stack, your timeline and the seniority the work actually needs. No forms, no sales sequence: a conversation with the people who would do the work.

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Related reading: dedicated development team, hire remote developers, custom CRM development.