In-house vs outsourced IT help desk: what each actually costs

We sell an outsourced help desk, so read this with that in mind. What follows is the arithmetic with the inputs sourced and the working shown, including the places where keeping it in-house is the better answer. If you only want the conclusion: for business hours at one or two people the gap is real but not dramatic, and for genuine round-the-clock cover it is enormous — not because offshore labour is cheap, but because coverage is a headcount problem and headcount is where salary compounds.

The salary column, done properly

Salary.com puts the median US IT help desk analyst at $56,886 a year as of 1 October 2026, with the middle half of the market between $51,201 and $63,394 — about $27 an hour.

Salary is not cost. US Bureau of Labor Statistics data for June 2026 puts benefits at 30.0% of total compensation for private-industry workers. Applying that ratio to the median gives a fully loaded figure of roughly $81,300 a year, and the middle half of the market lands between $73,100 and $90,600. That is before recruitment, before a laptop and a ticketing seat, before management time, and before the role sits empty for a month.

That $81,300 is arithmetic, not a survey finding: a sourced median divided by a sourced benefits ratio. The inputs are linked at the end so you can disagree with them rather than with the conclusion.

The column everyone leaves out: hours

A week contains 168 hours. A full-time analyst covers about 40 of them. Every comparison that sets one salary against one hourly rate has quietly assumed you only need a quarter of the week answered.

So the honest version of the question is not 'in-house or outsourced'. It is 'how many hours, and at what depth'. Three shapes cover almost everyone:

• Business hours, one site, one timezone — roughly 40 to 50 hours a week. One analyst, maybe two.
• Extended hours across a few timezones — roughly 60 to 80 hours. Two to three people before anyone takes leave.
• Genuine 24/7 — 168 hours. Four to five people, whoever employs them.

That last line is the one vendors avoid putting in writing. 168 divided by 40 is 4.2, and that is before holiday, sickness, training or attrition. Anyone quoting round-the-clock cover from one or two people is quoting an on-call pager and calling it a desk. We would rather lose that quote than win it.

Three options, priced side by side

Below are the three ways this actually gets bought. The offshore column uses our own published band, $14 to $20 an hour, because quoting a competitor's secret number would be worthless to you.

Business hours, one analyst

• In-house US analyst — about $81,300 a year fully loaded.
• Offshore dedicated agent — $26,880 to $38,400 a year at 160 hours a month.
• US managed service provider — billed by the hour or per user rather than per seat, so not directly comparable. On Clutch's US help desk directory, 61% of the providers listing a rate sit between $150 and $199 an hour, and a further 29% between $100 and $149.

The gap at this shape is roughly $43,000 to $54,000 a year. Real money, but not the order-of-magnitude story the category usually sells — and you have given up having someone physically present. If that matters, stop here and hire locally.

Genuine 24/7

• In-house — 4.2 analysts at $81,300 is about $341,000 a year, and a realistic five-person rota is about $406,000.
• Offshore — 4.5 agents at our published band is $121,000 to $173,000 a year.

This is where the decision stops being about labour arbitrage and starts being about shift patterns. In India the overnight window for a US or UK estate falls inside an ordinary working day, so you are paying a normal rate for a normal shift rather than a premium for someone awake at 3am against their will. That is the actual mechanism, and it is worth more than the hourly difference.

One more thing the calendar does for free: Indian public holidays do not overlap with American or British ones. Thanksgiving, Christmas and the August bank holiday are ordinary working days for the shift covering them.

What the offshore number does not include

Publishing a rate is only useful if you also publish what sits outside it. Ours excludes licences for your own systems — your ticketing seats, your remote support tooling, your MDM. It excludes your management time, which is real and usually underestimated in the first two months. And it excludes the transition itself: documenting what your current desk knows, which nobody enjoys and everybody discovers is undone.

Turnover hits both columns, not just ours. HDI puts annual agent turnover across technical support and service desks at nearly 40%, implying average tenure around two and a half years. An in-house desk is not a stable asset you buy once; it is a role you will refill. The difference is who carries the cost of refilling it.

Where in-house wins outright

• Desk-side work. Hardware swaps, cabling, a monitor that will not wake up — anything needing hands in the room needs a person in the room. No shift pattern fixes this and no vendor should pretend otherwise.
• Users who have said they want an onshore desk. If that preference has been stated, it is a requirement, not an objection to be argued down with a cost model.
• Regulatory or contractual constraints on where support staff sit or where data is processed. These are binary, and a cheaper quote does not move them.
• Very small estates. Below roughly twenty-five users the whole question is usually answered by one capable generalist who also does everything else, and splitting that role costs more than it saves.

The reassignment tax

The reason cheap outsourced desks disappoint is rarely the people and almost never the accent. It is the handoff. HappySignals' full-year 2023 benchmark puts every reassignment at more than seven points of end-user satisfaction and one hour forty-six minutes of that user's working time. At four reassignments the user has lost nine hours and eight minutes — more than a working day — to a problem they reported once.

A first line that can only reset passwords has to hand off everything else. If the second line is a different company or a different timezone, that handoff is where the day goes, and the cheap hourly rate you bought is being paid back out of your users' time instead of your budget. When you compare quotes, the number worth asking for is the proportion of tickets resolved at first line and the average number of reassignments — not the hourly rate and not the SLA.

Why we will not quote you per ticket

Per-ticket pricing looks like the fairest model and is the easiest to game. The commonly repeated benchmark is that an analyst handles 25 to 35 tickets a day. When Giva examined a year of data from one high-traffic customer, the same desk produced 1.4, 5.3 or 7.25 tickets per agent per day depending purely on which queues and which assignees you counted.

If the denominator moves by a factor of five based on a reporting choice, a per-ticket price is not a price. It is an invitation to close tickets quickly and reopen them as new ones. We quote per agent per month because the unit is unambiguous and because it keeps the incentive pointed at resolving things rather than at counting them.

How to compare the quotes you get

1. 01State the hours first, not the headcount. Ask every vendor how many people they are staffing against 168 hours and make them show the rota.
2. 02Ask what seniority the rate buys. A rate without a tier attached is not a price — L1 and L2 differ by roughly 60% in every market we checked.
3. 03Ask where the second line sits. Same team, same shift, same company, or somewhere else? This is the question that predicts satisfaction.
4. 04Ask for first-line resolution rate and average reassignments per ticket. Both are in every ticketing system and neither appears in a typical proposal.
5. 05Ask what is excluded. Licences, transition, out-of-hours multipliers and volume caps are where a cheap quote becomes an expensive one.
6. 06Ask who owns the knowledge base at the end. If it lives in the vendor's system, leaving is expensive by design.

The short version

For business hours at one or two people, in-house costs roughly $81,300 per analyst fully loaded against $26,880 to $38,400 offshore, and the deciding factor is usually whether you need someone physically present rather than the money. For 24/7, in-house is roughly $341,000 to $406,000 against $121,000 to $173,000, and the deciding factor is that 168 hours needs four to five people regardless of who employs them.

Our rates are published by seniority, the replacement is free at any point in the engagement rather than inside a trial window, and we will tell you to hire locally when the work is desk-side. If that is the shape of your problem, the brief takes ten minutes and three CVs come back within 48 hours.

Sahil Dubey

Group Managing Director

Runs engineering and compliance across the group. Twenty years in infrastructure, most of it on the operations side of systems that were already in production when he inherited them.

• CISA
• AWS Solutions Architect – Professional
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator Associate