In-house marketing hire vs offshore team: the real numbers

A mid-level marketing coordinator on a $90,000 salary costs an Australian employer closer to $115,000 a year once superannuation, leave, tools and the cost of hiring them are counted. Four part-time offshore specialists covering web, search, social and admin typically land under that figure. Whether that makes the offshore team the right answer depends entirely on what you actually need, which is what this article is about.

What the employee really costs

Start with a $90,000 base salary and add the things that are not optional.

• Superannuation at 12%, the rate from 1 July 2025 onwards, adds $10,800. From 1 July 2026 it is also payable each payday rather than quarterly, so it stops being a cash-flow buffer.
• Four weeks of annual leave is roughly $6,900 of salary paid while nobody is working, and many awards add 17.5% leave loading on top of that.
• Payroll tax applies once your total Australian wages pass your state threshold. Below it you pay nothing, which is why it catches growing businesses by surprise rather than new ones.
• Recruitment is commonly 15% to 20% of first-year salary if you use an agency, so $13,500 to $18,000 once.
• Software, hardware and a desk realistically run $3,000 to $6,000 a year per head.

Call it $115,000 in year one for a $90,000 hire, before anyone manages them. That is the number to compare against, not the salary.

What you get for it, and what you do not

You get someone in your business, in your meetings, absorbing context you never have to write down. For a company with a clear marketing strategy and a steady volume of work, that is genuinely valuable and hard to replicate.

What you do not get is breadth. A marketing coordinator is not also a developer, a designer, a copywriter and a paid search specialist. Most businesses under about twenty staff need small amounts of all five, not a full-time amount of one. So the coordinator ends up briefing freelancers for the things they cannot do, and you are paying for coordination as well as capability.

The question is not whether the hire is good value. It is whether one full-time person is the right shape for the work you actually have.

What the offshore alternative costs

A contracted offshore team is bought in hours rather than headcount. A typical arrangement covering a website, an ongoing search program, social media management and a part-time assistant sits in the low thousands per month depending on volume, which puts a year comfortably inside what the single hire costs.

The reason is not that the work is worth less. It is that the overheads behind it are Philippine rather than Australian. There is no superannuation, no payroll tax, no leave liability, no desk and no recruitment fee, because you are buying a service rather than employing a person.

Where the employee still wins

Be honest about these, because they are real.

• Work that needs someone physically present. Events, shoots, in-person sales support, walking into a client meeting.
• Work that depends on constant informal context. If the strategy changes weekly in corridor conversations, an offshore team will always be a step behind.
• Deep institutional knowledge over years. An employee who has been with you for five years knows things nobody wrote down.
• Situations where the role is genuinely full-time in one discipline. If you need forty hours a week of paid search, hire a paid search specialist.

The arrangement most businesses actually land on

One senior person in-house who owns strategy and the client relationship, with execution handled offshore. The in-house person stops spending their week resizing images and chasing a developer, and starts doing the work you hired them for. The offshore team absorbs the volume.

That structure costs less than two employees, covers more disciplines than three, and is the shape almost every business we work with converges on within a year.

How to decide

Write down every marketing and admin task from the last month and put hours against each one. Then group them by discipline. If one discipline is over about twenty-five hours a week, hire for it. If the hours are spread thinly across five disciplines, which is the normal answer, a single hire is the wrong shape and you will feel it within six months.

Whichever way you go, the mistake is deciding on the salary figure alone. It was never the real number.