Cost calculator
What would a senior engineer cost you in the US?
Pick a role and a state to see the all-in yearly cost of a senior US employee, next to a senior engineer through Remgu.
Senior full-stack engineer, employed in the US
- Base salary
- $179,400
- Social Security and Medicare
- $13,700
- Unemployment taxesFederal and state
- $400
- Health insuranceAverage employer share, individual cover
- $8,100
- Retirement contributionsAverage employer share
- $9,700
- All-in cost a year
- $211,400
A senior engineer through Remgu
$50–$80 an hour, all-in, paid only for the hours worked: 1,840 hours a year once holidays, vacation and sick days are taken out.
$92,000–$147,200a year
You save
$64,200–$119,400
a year, 30%–56% less than the US hire
- No fees on top of the hourly rate
- Hourly, 20 or 40 hours a week
- Embedded in your team, just like anyone else on it
The US figure leaves out recruiting fees, bonuses, equity, equipment and office costs, so the real gap is usually wider.
Get matchedHow we calculated this
- Salary: the median base pay of senior software engineers in the US is $195,000 (bonuses and stock left out), from Levels.fyi (November 2026)
- Specialty: Levels.fyi doesn’t split senior pay by specialty, so we adjust it by how the specialty is paid at all levels. A Full-Stack Software Engineer’s median base pay is $150,000, against $163,000 for all software engineers, from Levels.fyi
- State: salaries scaled by the state’s median wage for software developers compared with the national median (Alaska’s isn’t published, so it uses the national level), from BLS wage data (May 2025)
- Social Security (6.2% of pay up to $184,500) and Medicare (1.45%), from the IRS
- Unemployment taxes: 0.6% federal tax on the first $7,000, plus each state’s 2026 new-employer rate and taxable wage base (where the rate depends on the industry, the state’s lowest rate). The US average weights the states by how many software developers work in each. From the US Department of Labor
- Health insurance: the average employer contribution in 2026, $8,132 for individual cover and $20,833 for family cover, from the KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey
- Retirement: employers pay 5.4% of pay on average for management and professional jobs, from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (June 2026)
- Remgu: $50–$80 an hour is the all-in rate for senior engineers, with no other fees. A US employee works about 1,840 hours a year once roughly 6 weeks of holidays, vacation and sick days are taken out, and Remgu engineers are paid only for the hours they work, so both sides cover the same hours of work. See our FAQ
