Offshore Hiring Costs: FAQs

A senior software engineer in San Francisco commands $180,000-$230,000 in base salary. The equivalent profile costs $40,000-$65,000 in Medellin, Colombia; $50,000-$85,000 in Kyiv or Warsaw; and $25,000-$50,000 in Bangalore, India.

TCE is an indexed measure of the full all-in cost of employing a role at a given seniority level in a given market, typically indexed against a baseline (e.g. San Francisco = 100). A senior software engineer's TCE in San Francisco runs approximately $290,000-$380,000/year all-in; New York indexes at 88 (~$250,000-$335,000/year). Data sources include the Mercer Global Compensation Survey, Aon Hewitt Compensation Benchmark, and Radford Global Technology Survey.

Junior engineers (0-3 YOE) in Bengaluru cost roughly INR 6-14 lakh/year (~$7,200-$16,800), compared to $130,000-$185,000 total cash in San Francisco for the same experience level - a difference that persists at every seniority level, though the percentage gap narrows somewhat at the senior/staff level.