I just ran across an interesting survey and would love to share some of my thoughts here. It is a comparative analysis of offshore software development rates by country, published on Youteam.io The author compares the hourly rates requested by software teams in different regions of the world and refers to sources such as PayScale, SalaryExpert, Indeed, Upwork, TopTal, and YouTeam (a marketplace for on-demand engineering staff augmentation).
Here are the average hourly rates of software development provided in the survey, by region:
As you can see from the table, the difference in numbers for Asia, Africa and the so-called Western World is striking. In the article, it is explained by the differences in cost of life, seniority and professionalism of the development teams and cultural specificities in each region of the world.
According to the study, US-based and Western European companies prefer to hire senior software engineers. Many reasons can be behind this, such as the necessity to perform fast, set firm deadlines, keep stable in a changing environment, the need for strong leaders in each role, and limited availability of resources that make it impossible to hire and manage a big dev team, etc.
According to Indeed.com, the average base hourly rate of a software engineer in the United States is $71 per hour as of 2024, and this is how much the developer earns: the rate doesn’t include any taxes or additional expenses. Similarly, developers’ payment is quite high in Western Europe and the UK:
Eastern Europe closely follows the Western European world in development rates with Ukraine, Poland, and Romania being on top of the global software development. Other noticeable players in this region are the Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Moldova.
The research highlights Poland as one of the most expensive countries for software development outsourcing in the Eastern European region, which happens largely because it is regarded as one of the safest and most stable economies in the region. Thanks to continuous support of Polish IT industry coming from the local government and the European Union, many international corporations, including Google, Intel, and Siemens, keep development offices in this EU country.
Here are the average software engineer hourly rates (by country) in Eastern Europe in 2024, presented in the survey:
The article offers comparison of development rates in many regions of the world, and you are welcome to read the whole survey, but here I’ll only copy the table that shows the rates in major software development outsourcers of Asia; take a look and compare the differences with Europe:
The figures differ two, sometimes three and more times. I am going to research this and a few other sources of information more thoroughly and will soon publish my answers to the following questions:
- Why does the difference in regional rates keep being so strikingly big? and
- How long is this going to last?
Dear Colleagues in the world of software sales, I’d love to hear your opinions, too! Please, share your thoughts in the comments.
#softwaredevelopmentrates, #developmentrates, #costofdevelopment, #softwaredevelopmentEurope, #softwaredevelopmentAsia
Sources:
BD&C - Business Development & Consulting 
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