Check Your ROI: The Right Remote Talent vs. Local Hiring

A salary is not what a hire costs. The gap between the two is where most of this saving lives.

Hiring locally in the US, UK or North-Western Europe comes with steep base salaries and heavy hidden overhead, ranging from mandatory employer taxes to expensive health, pension and benefits packages. By hiring from Sri Lanka, global teams save 71% to 80% per role while we provide above-market compensation to your new colleague.

The comparison below is between two whole numbers: what the role costs you fully loaded where you are, and what it costs you through us. Ours is a single monthly invoice with employment, payroll, tax, equipment and management inside it, so there is nothing to add to our side of the line.

What “loaded cost” actually includes.

Loaded cost is the base salary plus everything an employer is obliged to pay on top of it. It is the number your finance team already knows and the one a job advert never shows.

• United States. Local base salary, employer FICA and payroll taxes at roughly 8–10%, healthcare coverage, and 401(k) matching.
• United Kingdom. Local base salary, 15% Employer National Insurance Contributions, statutory pension matching, and corporate benefits.
• North-Western Europe. Gross base salary plus mandatory employer social security, paid leave, and pension contributions, at regional Western European averages.

Recruitment fees, desk space, hardware and the management time a new hire absorbs sit outside even that figure. We have left all of it out of the comparison, which makes the numbers below conservative.

The numbers, by region.

Every rate is for a full-time position of 40 hours a week, filled by an experienced mid-to-senior professional. The local costs are major-metro rates and are benchmarked on London, Amsterdam and the larger US markets. If you hire outside those cities your own loaded cost will be lower than the figures here, typically by 10–15%.

Where these numbers come from

Each local figure is a base salary multiplied by that country’s employer on-cost. We have used one salary source wherever it covers the role, so the four departments are comparable with each other rather than stitched together from whichever survey flattered us.

• US base salaries. The Robert Half 2026 Salary Guide, national figures. Every US row here sits between their “low” and “mid” tiers: an assistant at about $63,600 against their $58,250–$70,250, an engineer at about $130,000 against their $113,600–$143,900 for DevOps and software engineering.
• UK base salaries. Robert Half and Robert Walters London ranges, taken at or below the 25th percentile. A UK-wide comparison would be roughly 10–15% lower on both sides.
• North-Western European base salaries. Netherlands and Germany market data, which is where the sourcing is thinnest: published figures for the same job title there can differ by a factor of two, so this column carries the widest margin of error on the page.
• Employer on-costs. 1.32× base in the US, within the 1.25–1.40× band that standard burden calculations give once FICA, healthcare, 401(k) and state unemployment are counted. 1.20× in the UK and 1.30× in North-Western Europe, on the statutory rates in the footnotes.

Recruitment fees, desk space, hardware and management time are excluded from the local side throughout, so the gap is understated rather than overstated. Where a category pairs two job titles, the figure is the midpoint of the two.

Our own rates are set in euros and converted at 1 EUR = 1.1622 USD and 0.8577 GBP, the ECB reference rates for early September 2026. They are a floor rather than a quote: the final figure depends on the person’s seniority and the scope of the role.

How to read your own case.

The bars widen as seniority rises. An engineer saves more than an assistant in every region, because the local premium on scarce technical skill is where the gap between markets is widest. If you are staffing more than one role, the engineering line is usually the one that pays for the exercise.

Two figures are worth checking against your own payroll before you trust ours. The first is your true employer on-cost percentage, which varies by state, country and company size. The second is the seniority you are actually buying, since a mid-level salary compared against a senior placement flatters whichever side you put it on. We have used experienced mid-to-senior on both sides throughout.

The saving is structural. It comes from where the work is done, and it holds for as long as the role does.

Frequently asked questions.