The Cost of Hiring Remote Developers: What an Australian Software Company Actually Paid

Short answer: a five-person development team in Sydney costs roughly A$700,000 to A$740,000 a year once superannuation and payroll tax are added to the salaries. The same five engineers hired as a dedicated remote team in India cost about a quarter of that. One Australian company we work with took the difference and spent it on headcount instead — ten people covering five disciplines, for around half of what the five Australians would have cost.

That is the whole article in a paragraph. The rest of it shows the arithmetic, names the sources, and explains where the comparison stops being fair — because the part most vendors leave out is the part that decides whether this works for you.

What does a developer actually cost an Australian employer?

Start with the number the Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes, because it is the only figure here that nobody is selling you.

In Employee Earnings and Hours, Australia, May 2025 (cat. 6306.0, released 23 January 2026), the ANZSCO sub-major group 261 — business and systems analysts, and programmers — records average weekly ordinary time earnings of A$2,688.00 for full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate. Annualised, that is A$139,776.

That basis matters. The full-time non-managerial adult-rate series is the one that compares like with like; the headline "all employees" series mixes part-time and casual work and produces numbers that look wrong next to any job ad you have ever posted.

For a sanity check from the demand side, SEEK's career pages put a software developer at A$90,000 to A$110,000, median A$97,500 (retrieved July 2026). That is job-ad-derived and self-reported, so treat it as a floor rather than a market rate — it skews toward the roles that get advertised publicly, which are rarely the senior ones.

Salary by seniority, Sydney

Against that baseline, here is what the bands look like in practice for a Sydney software company:

Why the salary is not the cost

Here is the mistake that makes every offshore comparison you have read useless.

In Australia, statutory employer costs sit on top of the salary. In India, they sit inside it.

Australian sources quote base salary. Superannuation, payroll tax and leave loading are added afterward. Indian salary sources quote Cost to Company — provident fund, gratuity and insurance are already inside the number you are shown. So when someone lines up "A$140,000 in Sydney" against "₹18 lakh in Pune" they are comparing a pre-loaded figure with a post-loaded one, and the gap they show you is wrong in the direction that flatters them.

What an Australian employer adds on top:

• Superannuation Guarantee — 12% of qualifying earnings (business.gov.au). Since Payday Super, it is paid alongside salary rather than quarterly, which changes cash flow as well as cost.
• State payroll tax — in NSW, 5.45% on Australian wages above a A$1,200,000 threshold (FY2026-27). Victoria is 4.85%. A company with five developers and a few non-technical staff crosses that threshold without noticing.
• Four weeks statutory annual leave, plus public holidays and leave loading where an award applies.

Together that is an employer load of roughly 12% to 17.5% — 12% if you sit under the payroll tax threshold, closer to 17.5% once you cross it.

The five-person team, costed properly

Take a normal team shape: one senior, three mid-level, one junior. If you want the India side of this costed in the same detail, we keep a sourced breakdown of what developers in India cost and how to read a quote without being surprised.

So: A$700,000 to A$740,000 a year for five developers, before you have paid a recruiter, bought a laptop, or leased a desk. Add recruitment fees at the going Australian rate, equipment, software seats and workspace, and you are north of A$750,000 for a team of five.

And that is the cost when hiring goes well. The number that never appears in a budget is the vacancy — the eleven weeks a senior React role sits open while the roadmap slips, which costs the same whether or not anyone is sitting in the chair.

The use case: an architectural takeoff company in Australia

The client is an Australian company that builds architectural estimation and takeoff software — the tool a builder or quantity surveyor uses to measure off drawings and price a job. They have been a client of ours for two years. They are not named here, and the figures below are theirs with their commercial detail rounded.

Their situation two years ago was the one every Australian software company of that size recognises. The product had customers and a roadmap. Building the roadmap needed roughly five engineers. Five engineers in Sydney was the better part of three quarters of a million dollars a year, and that was before the design work, the QA, and the marketing they were buying from agencies on separate retainers.

They had done the sum. The sum said they could afford the team or the growth, not both.

What they did instead

They moved the five engineering roles to a dedicated remote team with us — dedicated meaning the same named people every day, in their standup, in their repo, working their tickets, not a ticket queue shared with other customers.

At roughly a quarter of the loaded Australian cost, and with no employer on-costs, no recruitment fees, no desks and no equipment to buy, the five-person line went from about A$700,000 to about A$175,000.

On the development line alone that is a reduction of around 75 to 80 percent, depending on whether payroll tax applied that year and what you count as overhead. We are showing you the arithmetic rather than the headline because the headline on its own is the kind of claim this industry has made worthless.

The decision that actually mattered

Here is the part worth copying, and it is not the discount.

They did not bank the saving. They spent it on scope.

Instead of five developers, they built a team of ten covering five disciplines they had previously either done badly in-house or bought from agencies:

• Engineering — the original five roles, unchanged.
• Design — a product designer on the team rather than a contractor between projects.
• QA — dedicated testing, instead of developers testing their own work on a Friday.
• Digital marketing and SEO — brought inside, replacing agency retainers.
• Project management — someone whose job is the plan, which is the role a founder usually absorbs until it breaks them.

Ten people across those disciplines, costed the same way, lands near A$350,000 a year. Against the A$700,000-plus they would have spent on five Australian developers and the agency retainers alongside them, they are still roughly halving total spend — while running double the headcount and covering five functions instead of one.

That is the trade that actually changes a company's trajectory. A 75% cut on one line is a cost story. Doubling the team and adding four disciplines for half the money is a capacity story, and capacity is what ships a roadmap.

Why Australia works better than the US for this

Timezone is where most offshore arrangements quietly fail, and it is the one place Australian companies have a structural advantage they rarely get told about.

India runs on IST, UTC+5:30. Sydney is UTC+10 in winter and UTC+11 in summer — four and a half to five and a half hours ahead.

On a standard Indian working day of 09:30 to 18:30 IST, that maps to 14:00–23:00 in Sydney. Your team's afternoon overlaps their morning, giving about three and a half hours of live working time without anyone changing their hours. Shift the Indian day earlier — a 07:00 IST start is common and unremarkable — and the overlap becomes 11:30 to 18:00 Sydney time. Six and a half hours. A normal working relationship.

Compare that with the United States. A standard Indian day gives US Eastern zero live overlap, and Pacific none either. American companies working with Indian teams are running an overnight handoff whether they planned to or not. That is workable for queued, well-specified work — QA cycles, bug fixes, backlog burn-down — and genuinely difficult for live discovery or anything ambiguous.

Australia does not have that problem. This is the single most underrated reason Australian companies get better outcomes from Indian teams than American ones do, and nobody selling offshore development to the US market has any incentive to mention it.

Where this comparison stops being fair

Everything above is the case for. Here is the case against, which you will not find in most articles on this subject because most of them are written to close rather than to inform.

A quarter of the price is not a quarter of the management. A dedicated remote team needs specification, code review and a decision-maker who is reachable. If your engineering management capacity is already at its limit, adding five people anywhere makes it worse before it makes it better. The client above added a project manager for exactly this reason, and that was not incidental — it was the thing that made the other nine work.

The saving is on salary, not on the work. A badly specified feature costs the same to build twice in Pune as it does in Sydney. Offshore does not fix a product problem, a requirements problem, or a founder who changes direction monthly. It multiplies whatever process you already have.

Cheapest quote, most expensive project. The rate that looks too good usually is. It typically means juniors billed as seniors, a shared resource pool described as a dedicated team, or a body shop that will rotate your engineers out the moment a better-paying client appears. Two years of continuity, as in the case above, is the thing worth paying for — and it is the thing a low hourly rate is usually funded by giving up.

These numbers are one company's. The 75–80% figure is what the arithmetic produced for a specific team shape in a specific city in a specific year. Your senior-to-junior ratio, your state's payroll tax, and whether you cross the threshold will all move it. Treat the method as transferable and the number as illustrative.

How to run this calculation for your own company

If you want the honest version of this for your own situation, do it in this order:

1. Write down base salaries for the team you actually need, not the team you have. Use the bands above or your last three offers.
2. Add 12% for superannuation. Every time, no exceptions.
3. Check the payroll tax threshold for your state against your total Australian wage bill, not just engineering. Most companies discover they are over it.
4. Add recruitment at your actual historic cost per hire, including the roles that did not work out.
5. Add equipment, software seats and workspace per head.
6. Price the vacancy. Take your average time-to-hire for a senior role and ask what the roadmap slipping by that long costs you. This is usually the largest number on the page and the only one nobody writes down.

If you are earlier than that and still deciding whether to hire abroad at all, our guide to hiring software developers in India covers the selection and contracting side rather than the arithmetic.

Then compare that total against a quoted monthly rate for a dedicated team. Not against an hourly rate — hourly rates hide utilisation, and a team you pay for monthly and use half of is not cheap.

Frequently asked questions

What does a remote developer from India actually cost an Australian company?

Roughly a quarter of the loaded Australian cost for an equivalent level, with no superannuation, payroll tax, recruitment fees or equipment on top. The important detail is that Indian rates are quoted as Cost to Company, so statutory costs are already inside the number rather than added to it.

Is superannuation payable on offshore contractors?

Superannuation Guarantee applies to employees and to some contractors engaged wholly or principally for their labour under Australian law. A dedicated team engaged through an Indian company is a supplier relationship rather than an employment one, which is why the on-costs do not apply — but the classification depends on how the arrangement is actually structured, and it is worth ten minutes with your accountant rather than taking a vendor's word for it, including ours.

How much overlap will we get with an Indian team from Sydney?

About three and a half hours on a standard Indian working day, since 09:30–18:30 IST is 14:00–23:00 in Sydney. With the Indian team starting at 07:00 IST, overlap extends to roughly 11:30–18:00 Sydney time — six and a half hours, which is more overlap than most Australian companies have with a Perth office.

Is it cheaper to hire five developers or ten mixed specialists?

For the company in this article, ten mixed specialists cost roughly half what five Sydney developers would have, because the added roles — design, QA, SEO, marketing, project management — sit below senior engineering rates and replaced agency retainers that were being paid separately. Whether that holds for you depends on how much of that work you are currently buying outside.

What is the catch with offshore development?

Management load and specification quality. The cost falls; the need for clear requirements, code review and a reachable decision-maker does not. Teams that fail offshore usually had a process problem before they went offshore, and distance made it visible rather than causing it.

How long does it take to get a dedicated team running?

We match candidates within 48 hours and teams are typically working inside three weeks, against a market average of eleven weeks to fill a single senior role in Australia. The gap between those two numbers is usually worth more than the salary difference.

Sources

• Australian Bureau of Statistics, Employee Earnings and Hours, Australia, May 2025, cat. 6306.0, released 23 January 2026 — full-time non-managerial employees paid at the adult rate.
• business.gov.au — Superannuation Guarantee rate and Payday Super.
• Revenue NSW — payroll tax rates and thresholds, FY2026-27. State Revenue Office Victoria — current payroll tax rates.
• SEEK career advice, software developer — retrieved July 2026. Job-ad derived and self-reported.
• Client figures are from a two-year engagement, used with permission and rounded to protect commercial detail.