Agency, freelancer or dedicated developers? What mobile team augmentation costs per month

Short answer. Our rates are per engineer, about $30–90 an hour depending on level and experience. A full-time month is 160 hours, so one engineer from us costs $4,800–$14,400 a month, roughly £3,600–£10,800. A UK Android contractor at the median day rate of £450 costs about £9,000 for 20 working days. A UK agency at £650–£1,200 a day is £13,000–£24,000. An employee falls inside our range. At a salary of £65,000–£85,000, the employer pays about £6,300–£8,200 a month in salary, National Insurance and minimum pension, before recruitment and equipment.

So the monthly figure does not decide it. Three other things do: how fast someone starts and ships, who covers their time off, and how easily you can stop. Every third-party figure below is dated and linked to its source.

What one engineer-month costs in the UK

"One month" here means 20 working days, or 160 hours: the same full-time month our app cost calculator uses.

Where the numbers come from:

• Contractor and salary medians: IT Jobs Watch (Android contracts, iOS contracts, Android jobs, iOS jobs), from UK job ads in the 6 months to 23 September 2026. The samples are small: 58 Android and 66 iOS contract ads, and 36 and 50 advertised salaries. The permanent median for both Android and iOS jobs moved from £65,000 to £85,000 in a year, which shows how noisy small samples are. That is why the table shows both.
• Freelancer and agency day rates: Pocketworks, a UK app agency, in UK app development costs in a nutshell (Tobin Harris, updated 9 July 2026).
• Employer costs: employer National Insurance is 15% of salary above £5,000 a year in 2026/27 (GOV.UK). The minimum employer pension is 3% of earnings between £6,240 and £50,270 (The Pensions Regulator).

[TEAM SUPPLIES: re-check every IT Jobs Watch, Pocketworks, GOV.UK and Pensions Regulator figure at publish, and the Irish (IT Search, HERO, Citizens Information) and DACH (freelancermap) figures below, and update the dates. Recompute the euro column if the calculator's exchange rate has been refreshed.]

What the employee line leaves out:

• Recruitment: an agency fee or your own team's time, plus the months the role stays open.
• Equipment, software and management time.
• Paid time off. More on this under "Cover" below.
• One saving some employers get: the Employment Allowance takes up to £10,500 a year off an employer's National Insurance bill (GOV.UK). If your company has allowance left, the employee line is lower.

Per hour actually worked, an employee on £65,000–£85,000 costs roughly £43–£57, inside our per-engineer range of about £22–£67. That is before recruitment. If you have the time to hire and the work will last for years, hiring is a sound choice. We say more about that below.

Ireland, Germany, Austria and Switzerland

Ireland. Our figures are converted from US dollars to euro at the calculator's fixed rate, €1 ≈ $1.146, from the ECB reference rate of 22 September 2026.

• Salaries and mobile contract rates: IT Search, a Dublin IT recruiter, Software Development Salary Guide 2026 (May 2026). These are a recruiter's ranges, not a survey.
• IT contractor average: HERO Recruitment's 2026 IT rate guide, as announced by HERO in July 2026. We read the announcement, not the guide itself.
• Employer costs: employer PRSI (Irish social insurance) is 11.4% from 1 October 2026 for employees earning more than €552 a week (Citizens Information). Employers also pay a small pension contribution for eligible staff who have no workplace pension, under Ireland's new auto-enrolment scheme. The table includes it.

In Ireland, an employee on these salaries falls inside our monthly range.

Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Freelancers in software and web development charge a median of €90 an hour, according to freelancermap's Freelancer-Kompass 2026, a survey of 5,412 of its own users. At 160 hours, that is €14,400 a month, against about €4,200–€12,600 from us.

The Nordics. We have not found a Nordic rate survey we trust enough to quote. The public figures we saw came from marketplaces and agencies' own pages.

What we cost, by team size

• About $30–90 an hour per engineer, no minimum. Where an engineer sits in that range depends on their level and experience. Augmentation is our outstaff model: the engineer joins your team, and your contract is with us.
• How we bill: invoices in US dollars or euro, and pounds are possible, payable in 14 or 30 days depending on the agreement. We invoice monthly in arrears, on logged hours. A calendar month has 20 to 23 working days; we plan on 160 hours.
• Who you get: senior Android or iOS engineers who join your product team and work in your tools, on your sprint rhythm. A dedicated team from us is led by one of our lead engineers.

Six months, one engineer, full time: $28,800–$86,400 from us, roughly £21,600–£64,700. An Android contractor at the median day rate is about £54,000. A UK agency is £78,000–£144,000. An employee is a permanent hire, so a six-month view does not really fit: recruitment and notice come first.

Where the real difference is: speed, cover and exit

On monthly cost alone, a UK or Irish employee falls inside our range. So compare the things the monthly figure leaves out.

• Speed. An employee starts after your hiring process, and then after their notice period at their current job. A contractor starts when one you trust is free. We usually propose an engineer within 1–3 working days of your request, and can usually add them within one working week. After that, what counts is how soon their first change is merged, so ask any supplier for that number from a recent engagement.
• Cover. An employee gets at least 28 days of paid holiday a year (GOV.UK). That is 5.6 weeks, about a tenth of the year, plus sick days. You pay, and the work waits. A freelancer's time off costs you nothing, but the work stops. Whoever supplies the engineer, ask who covers the work while they are away.
• Exit. Ending employment means employment law and notice. With a contractor or an agency, it means the contract's notice. With us, the notice to scale down or stop is set in the agreement. In the first two weeks, you can stop, or ask for a different engineer, with no notice, and you pay only for the hours worked. At the end, we hand over notes on open work, an access list and one handover call, at no charge.

Sources for the legal rows (a summary, not legal or tax advice):

• Code counts as a literary work under the UK's Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (section 3).
• The employer owns what an employee makes in the course of employment (section 11(2)). Otherwise the author owns it, and a transfer must be in writing (sections 11(1) and 90(3)).
• Since 6 April 2021, the IR35 rules put the status decision on medium and large private-sector clients. For a small client, the contractor's own company decides (GOV.UK).

Four of our engagements inside client teams

In a monthly comparison, the figure to ask for first is how soon the engineer's first change is merged into your code. Merged means your team has reviewed it and accepted it into the main codebase. Until then, a month of cost produces nothing you can ship. Below are four engagements where our engineers worked inside a client's own team. What the engineers did day to day is on our mobile team augmentation page.

Both US clients needed the same thing: more expertise without growing their own headcount. Each of those engagements ran for about a year, and our developer worked the client's full US working day.

If your app talks to hardware, ask any supplier, us included, how the engineer will get the devices. On the POS platform, our engineers worked inside the client's team. Their work included the layers that connect the Android app to digital scales, receipt printers and barcode scanners over the store's local network. On the automotive radio, the client's Android layer had to talk reliably to specialised embedded hardware, and our engineers worked alongside its automotive teams.

Five questions to ask any augmentation supplier, us included

1. On your last engagement like ours, how many days passed between the request and the engineer's first merged change?
2. Who covers holidays and sick days, and how quickly?
3. What is the notice period to scale down or stop, and what do we get at handover?
4. Who owns the code, and which clause of the contract says so?
5. Who provides laptops, accounts and any test hardware, and by when?

Two of our answers are in this post: question 3 under "Exit", and question 4 in the comparison table. Ask us the other three on a call.

When you should hire, or use a contractor, instead of us

• Mobile is core to your business for years, and you can wait to hire. An employee builds knowledge that stays with you, and costs about what an engineer from us does per hour worked (see the UK section above).
• The job is short and well defined, and you have a contractor you trust. We have no minimum, so we can do it too, but someone who already knows your code will be quicker.
• You want someone else to own the whole outcome. That is a project, not augmentation. Our UK and Ireland app cost model shows how we price a whole app, and the app cost calculator gives you a range for yours. See also MVP app development and Android app development.
• You need someone in your office. Our engineers work remotely across Europe.

Questions buyers ask us

Next step

• Book a 30-minute call: tell us the role, the stack, the hours and your start date.
• Read how mobile team augmentation works with us, including how long our past engagements ran.
• Running an agency and need mobile capacity for a client? See how we work with partners.
• Need a whole app scoped instead? Read our app cost model or try the app cost calculator.