What IT staff augmentation actually costs

Almost every staff augmentation quote gets compared against the wrong number. A finance team looks at a $95 an hour contract rate, divides a $140,000 salary by 2,080 hours to get $67, and concludes the contractor costs 40 percent more. That comparison is wrong, and it is wrong in a way that consistently makes hiring look cheaper than it is.

This guide is the arithmetic. It does not tell you what Conntal charges — a single published rate you cannot plan against is worse than none, and what drives a specific rate is set out separately on our delivery models page. What follows is how to compare any quote, from us or from anyone else, against the real cost of the alternative.

Start from a published number, not a guess

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median annual wage for software developers at $135,980 as of May 2025 [1]. That is a median across the whole occupation and the whole country — a senior platform engineer in New York sits well above it, a junior in a low-cost metro well below. It is a starting point, not your number.

The naive hourly conversion is $135,980 ÷ 2,080 = $65.38. That figure is the source of most bad comparisons, because it is the cost of the salary, not the cost of the person.

Load it

BLS also publishes what employers actually spend. In its Employer Costs for Employee Compensation series, benefits accounted for 30.0 percent of total employer compensation costs in private industry as of June 2026 — $14.07 of every $46.89 per hour worked [2]. Wages are the other 70 percent.

So the fully loaded cost of that median developer is $135,980 ÷ 0.70 = $194,257 a year. One detail matters here: ECEC measures cost *per hour worked*, so paid leave is already netted out. Dividing by 2,080 therefore gives a like-for-like hourly figure rather than an optimistic one.

Several staffing vendors publish a fully loaded US figure of roughly $92 an hour [3]. We arrived at $93.39 independently from primary sources, so the agreement is reassuring — but the derivation is what you should rely on. A number in a vendor's blog post is a marketing asset, not a benchmark, including when it agrees with us.

What the loaded number still leaves out

$93.39 is the cost of an employee you already have. It is not the cost of getting one. Before a hire produces anything you also pay:

• Vacancy cost. The role sits empty while you search. On a platform migration with a deadline this is usually the largest number involved, and the one nobody puts in the comparison.
• Recruiting cost. Agency fees on a direct placement are conventionally quoted as a percentage of first-year base.
• Ramp. A new hire on an unfamiliar estate is not at full output on day one, and a niche platform estate is by definition unfamiliar.
• Wrong-hire risk. The cost of a mis-hire in a specialism your panel cannot assess is the whole salary plus the lost quarter.

None of those apply to a contractor who starts next week, and all of them are why the honest comparison is rarely as close as the hourly numbers suggest. Equally, the employee is permanent and the contractor is not. If the work is permanent platform ownership, the hire is the right answer, and we will tell you so.

The comparison, laid out

Read the bottom two rows together. They are the actual decision. Everything above them is arithmetic; those two are about whether the work has an end date.

What to ask a vendor about rate

1. 01Is the rate all-in, or are recruitment, replacement and management fees separate line items?
2. 02What is the markup over what the engineer is paid, and will you state it?
3. 03Does the rate change if the engagement extends, and in which direction?
4. 04What happens commercially if you replace the engineer in month two?
5. 05Is on-call inside the rate or billed separately?