Dedicated developer rates 2026: India, Eastern Europe, Latin America compared

We are a software company in India that sells developer time, so we have an interest in how this comparison comes out. To keep that in the open, this page uses only figures another organisation has published, names each one with its date, and shows our own prices separately.

We did not survey anyone for this page and we have no transaction data from the market. Everything in the first table is someone else’s number, and every source below also has something to sell. Where we did the arithmetic ourselves, the table says so. All figures were read on 30 October 2026.

The labels matter. Accelerance reports Asia, and names India, Pakistan and Bangladesh as its large talent pools, so its Asia figures aren’t India figures. Its Europe figures cover the whole continent, although it says the downward pressure was especially strong in Central and Eastern Europe. Arc lists India separately at $25–$60, in a table of senior freelance rates, so we show its South Asia row to compare region with region.

The third row appears in two places, which makes it look like two sources. FullStack’s price guide (last updated 14 October 2026) gives the same India and Latin America bands, and Imaginary Cloud says it took them from RaftLabs’ guide as reproduced in FullStack’s report. Count it once. Imaginary Cloud is also direct about the limits, describing the bands as what suppliers say they charge rather than what most buyers pay.

Read together, three things hold across all of them.

• India or South Asia has the lowest floor. Every source starts it below the other two regions.
• Eastern Europe and Latin America overlap. The gap between them is small next to the width of each range, so price alone won’t decide between them.
• Seniority moves the number at least as much as geography. In Accelerance’s figures, a senior in Europe or Latin America costs roughly twice a junior in the same region. The gap between a senior in Asia and a senior in Europe is similar in size.

The direction of travel in Accelerance’s November 2025 article was down: rates fell 7.1% year on year in Latin America and 4.4% in Europe, and effective rates in Asia dropped nearly 8%. That is one survey over one year, so we wouldn’t extrapolate from it.

A dedicated developer is usually bought by the month, so here are Accelerance’s ranges multiplied by 160 hours. We chose that source because it is the only one that splits junior from senior in the same way for every region. This is our arithmetic, not a price anyone has quoted, and it takes no account of the discount a supplier might give for a monthly commitment.

These are our published prices, in USD and invoiced in USD, GBP, EUR or INR. They are the same figures as on our pricing page and the hire developers page. The monthly figures are for 160 h per month, retainer discount. The effective hourly column is our division, shown so that you can line it up with the tables above.

Hourly work is from $20/h, for short pieces of work. That hourly rate is higher than the junior effective figure above because the monthly figures carry the retainer discount.

Please don’t read this table as a claim that we are cheaper than a region or better value than another supplier. It is one company’s list price. It tells you what we charge, and nothing about what a company in Warsaw or Bogotá would offer you for the same role. Ask us what a specific engagement includes, because that is where supplier prices really differ.

A billing rate covers far more than the developer’s salary. It is worth knowing the pay figures, because they show how much of a rate goes on everything else, and they help you spot a price that can’t be sustained.

• India. The 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey shows a median of $22,086 a year for back-end developers and $10,462 for front-end developers among its Indian respondents, from 1,093 people in India who answered the salary question. Those who answer that survey aren’t a random sample of Indian developers.
• Latin America. FullStack quotes Howdy, drawing on more than 12,500 employment agreements, at $40,000–$45,000 a year in take-home pay for juniors and $65,000–$75,000 for seniors. Howdy and FullStack both sell Latin American engineering, so read that with the same care.
• Eastern Europe. We did not find an equivalent named pay figure for the region as a whole that we were willing to publish, so we have left it out rather than estimate one.

The gap between pay and billing rate pays for recruitment, equipment, an office, management, HR, tax and employer costs, time between assignments, and the supplier’s margin. When we ran a team of 14–15 PHP developers in Kerala for a Dubai technology company for about three years, that was the shape of the work: we recruited them against the client’s profiles, employed and housed them, and provided equipment, management and HR while they worked only on the client’s products.

Here is the overlap between a 09:00–18:00 day in each city and the same local hours in London and New York, with nobody moving their hours. The figures are our arithmetic from each city’s UTC offset. London, Warsaw and New York change their clocks, New York on different dates, so a few weeks a year differ by an hour. India, Mexico City and São Paulo don’t change.

This table assumes nobody shifts their day, which real teams usually do. It shows how much has to be arranged, not what you will end up with. An India team working with New York only works with deliberately shifted hours, while a Warsaw team working with London needs nothing arranged at all.

We are an engineering team in India with 3–5 hours of overlap with the UK and Europe; US calls by appointment. Our office hours are Mon–Fri 09:00–18:00 IST; meetings outside hours by prior booking. Ask how the hours would be set for your engagement, and get the answer in writing. Our guide to managing a team in India from the UK covers running the day around this.

Accelerance’s managing director, Olivier Poulard, is quoted in its own article saying that hourly rates are a poor measure of the true cost of software development. It’s a fair warning. Before you compare two numbers, put these questions to both suppliers.

1. Is this a single person’s rate or a blended one? A blended rate includes managers and testers. A single-developer rate doesn’t, and you may end up doing that work yourself.
2. What does “senior” mean here? Ask for years of experience, what the person has shipped, and a chance to talk to them.
3. How many hours does the month contain? We price on 160. Divide every monthly quote by its own hour count before comparing.
4. What happens on public holidays and leave? Find out whether the monthly price changes.
5. Who employs the developer? An employee of the supplier, a subcontractor and a freelancer come with different risks. Our contract checklist explains why.
6. Which currency, and who carries the exchange-rate movement? Over a long engagement this can matter more than a small difference in the rate.
7. What does it cost to start and to stop? Ask about the notice period and handover at the end.

If you aren’t sure you want a dedicated developer at all, start with dedicated team or project outsourcing. A well-defined piece of work is often better bought at a fixed price.

• Accelerance, 2026 outsourcing rate trends, Peter Griffin, 24 November 2025. Accelerance’s full guide is gated. We used the figures in its public article.
• Arc, how much do freelance developers cost, 26 May 2026. Arc runs a developer hiring marketplace.
• Imaginary Cloud, cost to hire a software developer by region, 13 October 2026. Imaginary Cloud is a software house and says so on the page.
• FullStack, software development price guide, last updated 14 October 2026. FullStack sells nearshore engineering.
• Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025, work section.