One in-house IT hire costs what managed IT costs for about 98 users.

Limitations

• This card was measured on 2026-09-04 at a base of 39,372 in-scope US providers. The rest of this edition is frozen at 39,351 from 2026-09-03; a routine intake of 21 firms moved the base by 0.05% between snapshots. Every MSP-side figure here is quoted against 39,372, and no existing card was rebased.
• The in-house side is a cited external benchmark, not our measurement. Wages are BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook medians for May 2025. The 30.1% benefits share is BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation for March 2026, measured across all private-industry occupations rather than IT specifically.
• Loaded cost is the wage divided by 0.699. It covers benefits as BLS defines them. It excludes recruiting, a workstation, software licenses, training and management time, all of which fall on the in-house side only.
• The MSP side is an advertised entry rate, not a contract. The entry tier is each firm's cheapest published per-user, per-month rate, and a quote for a real environment usually lands above it.
• The break-even is arithmetic on two medians drawn from two different populations. No company was observed paying either number.
• 13.5% stating 24/7 coverage is a floor: hours are checked on 19,917 of 39,372 firms and an unchecked firm counts as showing nothing.
• Headcount is on file for 29,744 of 39,372 firms. The median of 9 describes the firms we can see, not the 9,628 we cannot.

What to do with this

• Buying: work out your own break-even before the first call. Loaded salary divided by twelve times the per-user rate is the whole calculation, and at the published medians it lands between 75 and 98 users.
• Selling: the comparison your prospect is running is against about $88,500 a year of salary, not against another provider. Price the coverage gap, 2,080 hours against 8,760, rather than the seat rate.

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