Most of the conversations about "should we just hire someone" start with a spreadsheet that has exactly one number in it: a salary. $65,000, maybe $75,000 for someone more senior. Set next to a managed IT quote that reads like $1,500 or $2,000 a month, the math looks obvious — hire the person, save the money.
That spreadsheet is missing almost everything that actually determines the cost.
What the salary line leaves out
As of June 2026, benefits added roughly 31.5 cents for every dollar of wages for full-time private-industry workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' most recent Employer Costs for Employee Compensation report. That's health insurance, retirement contributions, paid leave, and the legally required costs — Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance — that show up whether or not anyone asks for them.
That's before a laptop, a second monitor, or the software a working IT person actually needs — endpoint protection, remote monitoring, a password manager, a ticketing system. An outside provider already owns that tooling, spread across hundreds of endpoints. A new hire needs it bought and configured before their first day is useful.
Recruiting has its own cost too, mostly in time rather than a line item: sourcing, screening, interviewing, sometimes a placement fee. None of that shows up on the offer letter, and it repeats every time the person leaves.
The cost that doesn't show up on a pay stub at all
The real cost of one IT person isn't the salary plus benefits — it's what happens the week they're out.
One person means one point of failure. A vacation, a sick week, a resignation, and there's no coverage — not reduced service, none. Whatever they knew about your environment that never made it into a document leaves with them: which vendor login actually works, which workaround the shipping software needs after a reboot, which report the CFO expects on the fifteenth of every month. Rebuilding that knowledge after a departure is a real cost. It just never gets a dollar figure attached to it.
A salary is a monthly number. A single point of failure is a risk you're carrying every day, whether or not anything ever goes wrong.
What managed IT actually costs
We've written elsewhere about what actually drives a managed IT price and what's usually missing from a lowball quote, so we won't repeat it all here. The short version: one number, sized by what's actually being managed rather than by headcount — hiring doesn't move it, a heavy support month doesn't move it, and when the environment does change you hear about it before it's on an invoice. It also doesn't take a vacation.
That number isn't automatically cheaper than a salary. For a company mostly buying coverage for a handful of laptops and a shared drive, it usually is. For a company running real infrastructure, it can land close to what a mid-level hire costs. The point isn't that one number always beats the other — it's that they're not actually the same kind of number, and comparing a salary against a managed IT quote without pricing in the benefits, tools, recruiting cost, and coverage gap on the salary side isn't a fair comparison.
Why we'd tell you to hire in-house instead
Sometimes the in-house hire is the right call, and we'll say so.
If IT genuinely fills a 40-hour week — real infrastructure, a line-of-business application only your team understands, a production floor that can't wait on a ticket queue — a dedicated person whose only job is that system is worth the fully loaded cost. Institutional knowledge like that doesn't transfer well to an outside team, no matter how good they are.
The middle path a lot of organizations miss is that it doesn't have to be one or the other. Co-managed IT lets your internal hire own the systems only they understand, while an outside team covers the parts — after-hours coverage, specialist security work, a second set of hands during a vacation — that don't fit inside one person's week either way.
Sound like your situation?
If you're staring at a salary number next to a managed IT quote and they don't feel like they're measuring the same thing, they probably aren't. Signs your team has outgrown a single IT hire is worth a read if the gap is already starting to show up as missed patches or a bill that swings month to month.
Aweeba is a veteran-owned managed IT provider for 15-to-70-person organizations in the Denver metro area — manufacturers, nonprofits, and professional services firms in particular. Every ticket goes to a senior engineer, never a queue.
Not sure which side of this math your organization is actually on? Book a free IT risk review or call us at 720-794-0400.