At some point every growing business asks the same question: keep paying an outside crew, or hire our own IT person. The honest answer depends on head count, complexity, and what you need covered at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday versus 2 a.m. on a Saturday. Here's the math we walk clients through, including the cases where we tell them to hire.
What an in-house hire really costs
A capable generalist IT admin runs $65,000 to $95,000 in salary depending on market, plus 25 to 30 percent in taxes, benefits, and overhead. Call it $85,000 to $120,000 all-in. Then add the parts the salary line hides:
- Tooling. Monitoring, patching, ticketing, and backup software are licensed per business, and one-company pricing is worse than the pooled rates a provider gets. Budget $500 to $1,500 a month.
- Coverage gaps. One person takes vacations, gets sick, and sleeps. When they're out, you have nobody.
- Skills breadth. Networking, servers, security, cloud, and phone systems are different specialties. One hire is strong in two or three and googles the rest.
- Turnover. Good admins get recruited. When yours leaves, everything they knew leaves too, which is why documentation matters more than any single hire.
What managed IT costs for comparison
A 20-person company typically pays $2,000 to $4,000 a month for full coverage, so $24,000 to $48,000 a year. Details are in our pricing guide, but the shape of the comparison is: managed IT costs a third to half of one hire, includes the tooling, and doesn't take vacations.
The head-count rule of thumb
Under about 40 employees, outsourced almost always wins on cost and coverage. There isn't enough daily work to fill an IT person's week, and you're paying full-time money for part-time need.
Between 40 and 100 employees, it depends on complexity. A 60-person law office with cloud everything might stay fully outsourced forever. A 50-person shop with specialized equipment, on-site servers, and constant hands-on needs may justify a first hire.
Past 100 employees, you usually want at least one person on payroll who owns IT internally, with an outside crew behind them. That split has a name, and it works well. See co-managed IT.
When we tell people to hire
We're a managed IT shop, so discount this however you like, but we've told plenty of prospects to hire instead. The signals: your team files dozens of tickets a day, most issues need physical presence, you run gear that demands a specialist, or IT is genuinely core to your product. In those cases an outside provider is the wrong shape, and a good sysadmin hire beats any contract.
The hybrid most people land on
Plenty of businesses split it: an office manager or power user handles password resets and printer jams, and an outside crew handles servers, security, patching, and projects. That works fine as long as somebody writes down who owns what. When nobody does, things fall in the gap, and the gap is where outages live.
Want this handled instead of homeworked? That's the job.
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