The salary on the job advert is the smallest surprise in hiring a developer. The larger ones are what you pay on top, and how long you wait before any of it turns into working software.
A senior developer on £55,000 costs a UK business roughly £65,000 a year to employ, and closer to £79,000 in the first year once you add recruitment and kit. That's before the three months the role usually sits empty.
Here's the breakdown, then how it compares with the alternatives, then when hiring is still the right call. It often is.
What developers are paid
Job-advert data puts the median for PHP and Laravel developer roles in the UK around £45,000, with the upper quartile around £60,000. Senior people in strong demand, or anyone in London, sit above that. For the sums below we use three salaries, £45,000, £55,000 and £65,000, which covers most of what a small business actually pays for someone senior enough to work without close supervision.
Treat these as ranges, not quotes. Salaries move with the stack, the region and the market, so check current adverts for your area before you budget.
The cost on top of the salary
| £45,000 | £55,000 | £65,000 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Employer's National Insurance (15% above £5,000) | £6,000 | £7,500 | £9,000 |
| Workplace pension (3% minimum on qualifying earnings) | £1,160 | £1,320 | £1,320 |
| Software, licences and tooling (estimate) | £1,500 | £1,500 | £1,500 |
| Ongoing cost per year | ≈ £53,700 | ≈ £65,300 | ≈ £76,800 |
| Recruiter fee (about 20% of salary, one-off) | £9,000 | £11,000 | £13,000 |
| Laptop, screens and setup (estimate) | £2,500 | £2,500 | £2,500 |
| First-year cost | ≈ £65,200 | ≈ £78,800 | ≈ £92,300 |
Some notes on those figures:
- Employer's NI has been 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year since April 2025. That one change added a noticeable amount to every hire.
- Pension is the legal minimum employer contribution. Many employers pay more, especially for senior roles.
- Recruiter fees usually run from 15% to 25% of first-year salary. You can save it by hiring directly, but then the cost is your own time instead.
- Tooling depends heavily on your stack. The figure above is an estimate.
The costs that don't appear on an invoice
Time to hire. Writing the role, advertising, screening, technical tests, two or three interview rounds, an offer, and then their notice period at their current job. Three months from "we need a developer" to their first day is normal, and longer isn't unusual.
Ramp-up. A good developer still needs weeks to learn your codebase, your product and your customers before they're working at full speed.
Management. Someone has to set priorities, review their work and keep them unblocked. If that's the founder, it comes out of the time that should go on customers and sales.
One person is a single point of failure. Holidays, illness and resignations all stop the work. Twenty-eight days of statutory leave is close to six weeks a year with nobody shipping.
A developer isn't a product team. Most products also need design: the screens, the flows, the bit customers actually see. A developer handed vague requirements builds something that works but doesn't feel right. Add a senior product designer and the employment cost roughly doubles.
The alternatives, priced honestly
A freelancer
Experienced UK freelance developers commonly charge somewhere between £350 and £600 a day. That's a broad estimate, since rates vary a great deal by stack and experience. Three days a week at £450 is about £5,800 a month.
Freelancers are excellent for defined pieces of work. The risks are availability (good ones are booked up, and you can lose them to a bigger client), continuity (the knowledge leaves with them), and no design.
An agency, per project
Agencies quote by the project. A focused feature or small app is often £5,000 to £30,000. What you're really paying for is the proposal stage, the wait before work starts, change orders when the scope moves, and a team that has moved on by the time you need version two. We wrote about the trade-offs of outsourcing in more detail.
A product team on subscription
This is what we sell, so weigh it accordingly. £4,500 a month gets you a senior product designer and a senior Laravel developer working through your queue one request at a time. Founding places are £3,500 a month for the first six months.
| Hire one senior developer | Freelancer, 3 days a week | 628 subscription | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Year one cost | ≈ £79,000 | ≈ £70,000 | £54,000 (£48,000 on a founding place) |
| Time to start | ~3 months | Days to weeks, if they're free | Next working day |
| Design included | No | Rarely | Yes |
| Cover for holidays and illness | No | No | Yes, a named cover person |
| Notice to stop | Statutory notice, plus redundancy rules | Usually short | Pause or cancel any month |
Our plan is one active request at a time, roughly a continuously shipping lane rather than a full-time person sat at a desk. The full model, with the maths, is here.
When hiring is the right answer
Hiring in-house is often the right call, and we tell people that on calls.
- Engineering is your product, and it's going to stay that way. If you'll need people working on it full-time for years, build the team. The cost is an investment in knowledge that stays with you.
- You need more than one lane of work running permanently. If two or three things need to be in progress at any time, every week, hire.
- You already have a technical lead who can hire well, manage the work and review it.
A sensible path for many founders is to subscribe now, ship while you work out what the product needs, and hire once you know exactly what role you're filling. Many of the best job specs are written by people who've already watched the work get done.
Where to start
If you want the work moving this week rather than next quarter, see how the product team works or go straight to pricing. Cancel within your first week and we refund 75%.
Not sure yet? Book thirty minutes and we'll tell you honestly whether to subscribe, hire, or hire a freelancer for one job. It's a perfectly good outcome if the answer isn't us.
