Offshore software development rates by country (2026 guide)

Offshore developer rates fall into broad tiers rather than fixed numbers. South and South East Asian markets sit at the bottom, Eastern Europe, Latin America and South Africa sit in the middle, and the more established Central European markets such as Poland sit closest to Western European pricing. Portugal is not really offshore at all: it is Western Europe and a nearshore option for UK buyers, and it is priced accordingly. By comparison, we publish rates of £75 to £150 an hour. The gap is real, but it is not the whole cost, and the rest of this guide is about the part of the bill that the hourly rate does not show you.

We are not going to print a table of invented hourly figures. Rates move constantly, they vary enormously by seniority and contract length, and any number we quoted without a dated survey behind it would be a guess dressed up as data. What we can tell you honestly is how the tiers rank, why they rank that way, and what changes once the work actually starts. Ask three suppliers in the country you are considering for a written rate card, and you will have better data than any blog post can give you.

We build software in the UK, and a good deal of our work is rescuing builds that have stalled before they reached us, so treat what follows as a practitioner’s view rather than a neutral one. We have tried to be straight about where offshore genuinely wins.

Offshore rate tiers by country in 2026

The table below ranks the common destinations by relative cost rather than by a hard rate, and notes the practical detail that usually matters more than price: market depth, where the quality spread is widest, and time zone overlap where it is the deciding factor. Overlap is covered in full in the section below.

Country	Relative cost	Notes
India	Entry tier	Enormous supply, very wide quality spread
Pakistan	Entry tier	Similar profile to India, smaller market
Philippines	Entry tier	Strong English, good for support and QA
Vietnam	Entry to mid tier	Growing fast, strong on mobile
Ukraine	Mid tier	Deep engineering talent, ongoing war risk
South Africa	Mid tier	English first, one to two hours ahead of the UK
Argentina	Mid tier	Three to four hours behind the UK, overlap falls in the UK afternoon
Brazil	Mid tier	Large market, three to four hours behind the UK, overlap falls in the UK afternoon
Romania	Mid to upper tier	EU member, solid process maturity
Poland	Upper tier	Senior-heavy, closest to Western pricing
Portugal	Upper tier	Western Europe, nearshore for the UK, same clock as London
United Kingdom	£75 to £150 an hour	Our published rate, includes delivery overhead

Two things are worth saying plainly. Firstly, the cheapest countries have the widest quality spread, so the risk of a bad hire is highest exactly where the saving looks best. Secondly, a UK agency rate is not a developer’s wage. It covers project management, testing, design, account handling and the cost of someone being accountable when things go wrong. Comparing it against a lone offshore contractor’s rate is comparing two different products.

Philippines vs UK developer costs

This is one of the comparisons we are asked about most, so here it is directly. The Philippines sits in the entry tier, and the headline hourly difference against a UK agency is large enough that it is easy to stop reading there. The interesting question is what happens to that difference once you have run a project.

In practice the gap narrows. Filipino teams work seven to eight hours ahead of the UK, so a team keeping ordinary Manila hours has finished for the day by late morning in London, leaving you around two hours of overlap in summer and barely one in winter. A team willing to start late and work into their evening can give you most of a shared working day, but that is a concession to negotiate and put in writing, not something to assume. You will need someone in the UK writing specifications and reviewing work, and that person’s time is a genuine cost even when it never appears on an invoice. The Philippines is a strong choice for ongoing support, testing and maintenance of a system that already works, and a harder choice for the messy first build of something nobody has specified yet.

What drives the differences

Cost of living and local salary expectations

This is the largest single factor. A developer’s rate has to support their life where they live, so markets with lower housing and living costs produce lower rates. It is also why rates in Poland and Romania have climbed towards Western European levels over the past decade: as those economies have grown, so have wage expectations.

Seniority, not nationality

A genuinely senior engineer in Bangalore or Warsaw is not cheap. The very low headline rates you see advertised almost always buy junior or mid-level people, sometimes with a senior name attached to the proposal who does not work on your project. Ask who is actually assigned, by name, and ask to speak to them.

Time zone overlap

The less overlap you have, the more often a simple question turns into a whole day of waiting. A question asked at 4pm in London and answered at 9am the next day is not a blocker once. It becomes one every time it happens, and on a long project it happens constantly. South Africa, Portugal and Romania are much easier to work with from the UK than the Philippines or Vietnam for this reason alone.

Specification quality

Where communication is harder, you have to write more down. If your requirements are vague, an offshore team will build exactly what you wrote rather than what you meant, and you will pay twice. Our guide to software requirement specifications covers what a usable spec contains.

The costs the hourly rate hides

• Your own management time. Someone senior in the UK will be writing briefs, reviewing output and answering questions every week. If that person is your CTO or founder, cost their time at its real value.
• Rework. The pattern we see most often is a build that is nearly finished and effectively unmaintainable. In our experience, fixing a build like that often costs more than building it once.
• Onboarding and turnover. Offshore agencies tend to rotate staff more often than an in-house team does, and each rotation costs you context.
• Legal and IP. Enforcing a contract across jurisdictions is slow and expensive. Check who owns the code. With us you own 100 per cent of it, and that should be your baseline everywhere.
• Security and compliance. If you handle UK personal data, you need to know where it is processed and stored.

Once you add these in, offshore usually still saves money on large, well-specified, long-running work. It saves much less, and sometimes nothing at all, on small or ill-defined projects where the overhead is proportionally larger.

When offshore is the right answer, and when it is not

Offshore works well when the scope is stable and written down, the work runs for months rather than weeks, and you have someone technical in-house to review output. Maintenance of an existing platform, a well-specified integration, a test automation suite and a second app for a proven product all fit this description.

It works badly when you are still discovering what to build, when the deadline is short, when the domain needs constant conversation with your own staff, or when nobody on your side can tell good code from bad. In those situations you are not buying cheaper development. You are buying an expensive discovery process conducted by post.

There is a middle path many UK companies take: a UK partner who owns the architecture, the standards and the accountability, with offshore capacity underneath for volume work. We have written more about the trade-offs in our guides to outsourcing custom software and the pros and cons of offshore development.

How to check a quote before you sign

1. Ask for the named individuals on your team and their years of experience.
2. Ask for a code sample or a repository walk-through from a comparable project.
3. Confirm the working hours in your time zone, in writing, not “we are flexible”.
4. Confirm the contract states you own all intellectual property outright.
5. Ask what happens if a developer leaves mid-project, and who pays for the handover.
6. Start with a small paid piece of real work rather than a large commitment.

If a quote is dramatically below every other quote you have received, that is information. Sometimes it means low overheads. More often it means the scope has been read optimistically and the variations will arrive later, which is why the risks of outsourcing tend to be commercial rather than technical.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do offshore software development rates compare by country in 2026?

Offshore rates fall into tiers rather than fixed figures. India, Pakistan and the Philippines sit at the entry level, with Vietnam a little above. Ukraine, South Africa, Argentina and Brazil sit in the middle, with Romania towards the upper end of that group. Poland is the most expensive genuinely offshore option and comes closest to Western European pricing, whilst Portugal is Western Europe itself and prices as nearshore. We publish rates of £75 to £150 an hour, covering project management, design, testing and accountability rather than developer time alone.

Is it cheaper to hire developers in the Philippines than in the UK?

Yes, on the hourly rate: the Philippines sits in the entry tier and we charge £75 to £150 an hour. The total saving is smaller than that headline comparison suggests, because you also carry UK management time, the seven to eight hour time difference and the extra specification work a remote team needs. The saving is real on long, well-defined work and much thinner on short or vague projects.

How much does offshore software development cost in total?

There is no single figure, but the honest way to bracket it is to price the work in the UK first. We would price a typical mid-range project at £50,000 to £150,000 here, and an offshore quote for the same scope will usually land well below that on paper. The true total sits somewhere between the two, once you add your own management time, the cost of writing detailed specifications and a realistic allowance for rework. Small projects save proportionally less, because that overhead does not shrink with the build.

Which country is best for offshore software development?

There is no single best country, only the best fit for your constraints. If time zone overlap matters most, South Africa and Romania suit UK companies, as does nearshore Portugal. Portugal keeps the same clock as London, and South Africa is only an hour or two ahead. If cost matters most and the scope is well defined, India and the Philippines offer the widest supply. If you need deep senior engineering and will pay for it, Poland is closest to Western European standards.

Why are offshore developer rates so much lower?

Rates track the local cost of living and salary expectations rather than the quality of the work. A developer in Manila or Hanoi can earn a good local living at a fraction of a London salary. Lower rates also often reflect a leaner service: you may be buying a developer’s hours only, without the project management, testing, design and account handling included in a UK agency rate.

Can I mix a UK team with offshore developers?

Yes, and for many UK companies this is the sensible compromise. A UK partner owns the architecture, the code standards, the review process and the commercial accountability, with offshore capacity handling volume work underneath. You pay more than a pure offshore arrangement and considerably less than an all-UK team, and you keep someone in your own time zone who is answerable for the result.

If you would like a UK figure to compare your offshore quotes against, our cost estimator will give you a range in a few minutes, or you can tell us about the project and we will give you an honest view of whether offshore is the right call. If an offshore build has already stalled, our software rescue work is where most of those conversations start.