What is the fully-loaded cost of hiring an IT person in 2026?

According to Bureau of Labor Statistics compensation data and SHRM benefits cost research, a $100,000 base salary IT hire in Orange County costs $155,000–$165,000 fully loaded when you include health insurance, payroll taxes, 401(k) match, PTO backfill, tools, and training. A $75,000–$85,000 junior hire still runs $115,000–$130,000 annually.

How much do managed IT services cost for a 50-person company?

A 50-person company using managed IT services in Orange County typically pays $6,500–$8,750 per month ($78,000–$105,000 annually) for comprehensive coverage including 24/7 monitoring, help desk, security tools, and strategic guidance. This is consistently less than the fully-loaded cost of a single mid-level in-house IT hire.

At what company size does hiring in-house IT make more financial sense?

Most IT consultants and Gartner IT staffing benchmarks place the crossover point at 100–150 users, where the cost of a small internal IT team becomes competitive with MSP per-user pricing. Below 100 users, outsourcing is almost always more cost-effective when fully-loaded costs are compared honestly.

What is the risk of hiring a single IT person?

A single IT employee creates a single point of failure. When they are sick, on vacation, or handling one issue, you have zero IT support. They are also limited to their personal expertise — strong on end-user support but potentially weak on advanced networking, security incident response, or specialized platform administration. An MSP provides a full team behind every ticket.

Can we have an internal IT person and also use an MSP?

Yes. Co-managed IT is designed for exactly this scenario. Your internal IT person handles daily user support and serves as the internal technology advocate, while the MSP provides 24/7 monitoring, specialized expertise, and overflow support. This is the best of both models for companies that want institutional IT knowledge in-house.

What does outsourcing IT include that a single hire does not?

A managed IT service typically includes specialists across networking, security, cloud, and applications — roles that would require four or five separate hires to replicate in-house. MSPs also provide enterprise-grade security tools, 24/7 monitoring platforms, and documented processes built from years of client work. No single hire can match that breadth.

The True Cost of Hiring Your First IT Person vs. Outsourcing | 2026 Analysis

Why the Job Posting Salary Is Not the Real Number

When a company decides to hire its first IT person, the conversation usually starts with salary. A quick search reveals IT support specialists in Orange County earning $65,000–$85,000 per year, while a more senior systems administrator runs $85,000–$120,000. That number feels manageable — roughly the cost of one good hire.

The problem is that salary is only the starting point. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (ECEC) survey, benefits and taxes add an average of 31–38% on top of wages for private-sector employees. For a $100,000 salary, that means an actual employer cost of $131,000–$138,000 before you spend a single dollar on tools or training.

The components most hiring managers overlook:

Health insurance: Employer-sponsored health coverage averaged $7,911 per employee per year for single coverage and $22,798 for family coverage in 2024, according to KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) Annual Employer Health Benefits Survey data.
Payroll taxes: FICA (Social Security + Medicare) alone adds 7.65% to every dollar of wages. Add California's unemployment insurance (up to 6.2% on the first $7,000) and SUI training tax.
401(k) match: SHRM research shows the median employer 401(k) match is 4% of salary. At a $100,000 salary, that is $4,000 per year.
PTO and holidays: The average US employee receives 15 days of PTO and 10 holidays annually. That is 25 days where you are paying full salary but getting no output — and someone else must cover.

Hidden Costs: Tools, Training, and Coverage Gaps

Beyond compensation, a functioning IT employee needs a professional toolkit and ongoing education. These costs are often excluded from initial budget projections.

Tool Stack Costs (Annual)

Remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform: $3,000–$8,000/year for a company of 50 users
Professional security suite (EDR, email security, DNS filtering): $8,000–$15,000/year
Backup and disaster recovery: $3,000–$6,000/year
Password manager, MFA platform, documentation system: $1,500–$3,000/year

Training and Certification
A competent IT generalist needs to stay current across networking, Microsoft 365, cybersecurity, and your line-of-business applications. Industry training budgets for IT professionals average $2,000–$5,000 per year, according to CompTIA's IT Industry Outlook. Certifications (CompTIA Security+, Microsoft certifications) add another $500–$2,000 in exam fees.

Recruitment Cost
The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) estimates the average cost per hire at $4,700 when factoring in job board fees, recruiter time, interview time, and onboarding. For IT roles that require technical assessments, this number often runs higher. If the hire does not work out in the first year — a meaningful risk with a first IT hire who may be overwhelmed — you pay this again.

Coverage Gaps
A single IT employee cannot provide meaningful coverage beyond roughly 45 hours per week. Nights, weekends, vacation days, sick days, and the inevitable times when they are tied up on one issue create windows where your business has no IT support. According to Gartner IT staffing research, organizations with fewer than three IT staff have significant coverage gaps that correlate with longer incident resolution times.

The Fully-Loaded Cost: Building the Real Number

Here is how the math works for a mid-range IT hire at $100,000 base salary in Orange County:

Base salary: $100,000
Health insurance (employer share, family): $16,000
Payroll taxes (FICA + CA SUI/ETT): $8,650
401(k) match (4%): $4,000
PTO backfill and lost productivity (25 days): $9,615
Tool stack (RMM, security, backup, documentation): $16,000
Training and certification: $3,500
Recruitment (amortized over 3 years): $1,567
Total fully-loaded annual cost: $159,332

This is before factoring in the management overhead of having a direct report (typically 10–15% of a manager's time), or the productivity cost when the IT person is sick, on vacation, or attending a conference.

The lower end of the range — a $75,000–$85,000 hire who is more junior — still lands at $115,000–$130,000 fully loaded. They also bring less experience, meaning more time spent learning, more escalations to external vendors, and more risk on complex problems.

What Managed IT Services Actually Cost

Orange County managed IT services for a 50-person company typically run $130–$175 per user per month for comprehensive coverage. At $157/user/month — a midpoint for full-service MSP coverage — a 50-person company pays:

Monthly: $7,850
Annual: $94,200

That $94,200 includes:

24/7/365 monitoring and alerting across all devices and servers
Help desk coverage during and after business hours
A full team of specialists (networking, security, cloud, applications) rather than one generalist
Enterprise-grade security stack (EDR, email filtering, DNS protection, SIEM)
Backup monitoring and disaster recovery management
Patch management and vulnerability remediation
Strategic guidance and technology roadmapping
No PTO gaps, no sick days, no vacation blackouts

The cost advantage is clear, but the more important factor for most companies is depth of expertise. A single IT hire — no matter how talented — is a generalist. When your network has a complex routing issue, when Exchange migration requires precise planning, or when a security incident requires forensic investigation, a team of specialists resolves problems faster and with less risk than a solo generalist who is stretching into unfamiliar territory.

When Hiring Makes Sense vs. When to Outsource

The decision is not always purely financial. Several factors favor one approach over the other:

Hire in-house when:

You have 150+ users where an internal IT team becomes cost-competitive with MSP pricing per user
You have highly specialized or proprietary systems that require deep institutional knowledge
Your industry has strict data sovereignty requirements that make remote access by a third party problematic
You want IT embedded in company culture with authority to drive technology strategy at the executive level

Outsource to an MSP when:

You have fewer than 150 users — the math consistently favors outsourcing below this threshold
You are hiring your first IT person (highest risk point — single point of failure from day one)
Your business needs shift significantly (rapid growth, new locations, remote workforce expansion)
You need specialized expertise in cybersecurity, compliance, or specific platforms
You want predictable monthly costs without the risk of a bad hire

Consider co-managed IT when:

You have one or two internal IT staff who need overflow support and specialized expertise
Your internal IT person is strong on end-user support but weak on security or infrastructure
You want to retain institutional knowledge in-house while augmenting with MSP capabilities

For Orange County defense and aerospace companies like those in the Irvine tech corridor who are hiring their first IT person, the MSP model frequently delivers better outcomes. The fully-loaded cost of a single mid-range hire exceeds MSP costs by $50,000–$70,000 annually, while providing narrower coverage and single-point-of-failure risk.

How to Make the Decision for Your Company

Before committing either direction, run this analysis for your specific situation:

Step 1: Inventory your IT needs — Count your users, identify your critical systems, and catalog your compliance requirements (CMMC, HIPAA, SOC 2, etc.). Compliance requirements often favor MSPs with existing framework expertise.

Step 2: Calculate your fully-loaded hire cost — Use the components above adjusted for your target salary range and benefits structure. Do not use the job posting salary as your budget number.

Step 3: Get MSP quotes for your user count — Compare the full scope of services included. A lower per-user rate that excludes security tools or after-hours support is not a fair comparison.

Step 4: Factor in growth trajectory — If you are growing from 50 to 100 users in two years, an MSP scales with you. A single hire becomes increasingly overwhelmed as you grow, often leading to the worst outcome: a reactive hire-fire-hire cycle.

Step 5: Assess your risk tolerance — A single in-house IT person is unavailable when sick, on vacation, or simply occupied. For businesses where IT downtime has direct revenue impact, coverage continuity is a critical factor.

BRITECITY offers a free consultation to help Orange County businesses model these costs against their specific situation before making the decision.

Why the Job Posting Salary Is Not the Real Number

Health insurance: Employer-sponsored health coverage averaged $7,911 per employee per year for single coverage and $22,798 for family coverage in 2024, according to KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation) Annual Employer Health Benefits Survey data.
Payroll taxes: FICA (Social Security + Medicare) alone adds 7.65% to every dollar of wages. Add California's unemployment insurance (up to 6.2% on the first $7,000) and SUI training tax.
401(k) match: SHRM research shows the median employer 401(k) match is 4% of salary. At a $100,000 salary, that is $4,000 per year.
PTO and holidays: The average US employee receives 15 days of PTO and 10 holidays annually. That is 25 days where you are paying full salary but getting no output — and someone else must cover.

Hidden Costs: Tools, Training, and Coverage Gaps

Beyond compensation, a functioning IT employee needs a professional toolkit and ongoing education. These costs are often excluded from initial budget projections.

Tool Stack Costs (Annual)

Remote monitoring and management (RMM) platform: $3,000–$8,000/year for a company of 50 users
Professional security suite (EDR, email security, DNS filtering): $8,000–$15,000/year
Backup and disaster recovery: $3,000–$6,000/year
Password manager, MFA platform, documentation system: $1,500–$3,000/year

The Fully-Loaded Cost: Building the Real Number

Here is how the math works for a mid-range IT hire at $100,000 base salary in Orange County:

Base salary: $100,000
Health insurance (employer share, family): $16,000
Payroll taxes (FICA + CA SUI/ETT): $8,650
401(k) match (4%): $4,000
PTO backfill and lost productivity (25 days): $9,615
Tool stack (RMM, security, backup, documentation): $16,000
Training and certification: $3,500
Recruitment (amortized over 3 years): $1,567
Total fully-loaded annual cost: $159,332

What Managed IT Services Actually Cost

Monthly: $7,850
Annual: $94,200

That $94,200 includes:

24/7/365 monitoring and alerting across all devices and servers
Help desk coverage during and after business hours
A full team of specialists (networking, security, cloud, applications) rather than one generalist
Enterprise-grade security stack (EDR, email filtering, DNS protection, SIEM)
Backup monitoring and disaster recovery management
Patch management and vulnerability remediation
Strategic guidance and technology roadmapping
No PTO gaps, no sick days, no vacation blackouts

When Hiring Makes Sense vs. When to Outsource

The decision is not always purely financial. Several factors favor one approach over the other:

Hire in-house when:

You have 150+ users where an internal IT team becomes cost-competitive with MSP pricing per user
You have highly specialized or proprietary systems that require deep institutional knowledge
Your industry has strict data sovereignty requirements that make remote access by a third party problematic
You want IT embedded in company culture with authority to drive technology strategy at the executive level

Outsource to an MSP when:

You have fewer than 150 users — the math consistently favors outsourcing below this threshold
You are hiring your first IT person (highest risk point — single point of failure from day one)
Your business needs shift significantly (rapid growth, new locations, remote workforce expansion)
You need specialized expertise in cybersecurity, compliance, or specific platforms
You want predictable monthly costs without the risk of a bad hire

Consider co-managed IT when:

You have one or two internal IT staff who need overflow support and specialized expertise
Your internal IT person is strong on end-user support but weak on security or infrastructure
You want to retain institutional knowledge in-house while augmenting with MSP capabilities

The True Cost of Hiring Your First IT Person vs. Outsourcing | 2026 Analysis

Why the Job Posting Salary Is Not the Real Number

Hidden Costs: Tools, Training, and Coverage Gaps

The Fully-Loaded Cost: Building the Real Number

What Managed IT Services Actually Cost

When Hiring Makes Sense vs. When to Outsource

How to Make the Decision for Your Company

Common Questions About This Topic

What is the fully-loaded cost of hiring an IT person in 2026?

How much do managed IT services cost for a 50-person company?

At what company size does hiring in-house IT make more financial sense?

What is the risk of hiring a single IT person?

Can we have an internal IT person and also use an MSP?

What does outsourcing IT include that a single hire does not?

Explore More IT Topics

MSP Onboarding Process

MSPs in Orange County

Law Firm IT Warning Signs

Ready to Discuss Your IT Needs?

The True Cost of Hiring Your First IT Person vs. Outsourcing | 2026 Analysis

Why the Job Posting Salary Is Not the Real Number

Hidden Costs: Tools, Training, and Coverage Gaps

The Fully-Loaded Cost: Building the Real Number

What Managed IT Services Actually Cost

When Hiring Makes Sense vs. When to Outsource

How to Make the Decision for Your Company

Common Questions About This Topic

What is the fully-loaded cost of hiring an IT person in 2026?

How much do managed IT services cost for a 50-person company?

At what company size does hiring in-house IT make more financial sense?

What is the risk of hiring a single IT person?

Can we have an internal IT person and also use an MSP?

What does outsourcing IT include that a single hire does not?

Explore More IT Topics

MSP Onboarding Process

MSPs in Orange County

Law Firm IT Warning Signs

Ready to Discuss Your IT Needs?