Many organizations are still bound to hiring locally in their own country or even cities. Even a lot of tech companies are not even close to hiring globally. 

That’s an opportunity missed, because there is a lot of great tech talent to be found around the globe.

When you expand your horizon, you may benefit from the extended talent pool, but also from the typically lower wages that you can find offshore. 

And nowadays this is not only available for hiring contractors, you can also find and hire permanent full-time employees worldwide through an Employer of Record (EOR).

Knowing this, not the country you’re based out of but the entire globe becomes your talent pool.

High performing, cost efficient and grateful employees are waiting to be catapulted into prosperity and get closer to equal buying power and opportunity in general.

Here’s a list of the countries with great tech talent with the lowest wages:

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How to read this table

Two things to be honest about before you build a business case on these numbers.

First, they are a snapshot of Payscale and Glassdoor averages taken when this article was published, and the two sources disagree wildly. Sri Lanka is $22,200 on Payscale and $5,200 on the Glassdoor sample: a 4x spread on the same job title in the same country. Averaging two numbers that far apart does not produce a precise answer, it produces a midpoint. Treat the ranking as directional, not as a quote.

Second, and more important, these are local averages. They describe what employers in that country pay. That is not the same as what you will pay.

The remote premium: why you will pay more than the table says

This is the trap that catches most first-time global hires.

A local average is dragged down by the entire local market: domestic firms, agencies, government IT, junior body shops. The developer you actually want (senior, fluent English, used to Western product teams, willing to overlap your timezone) is not selling into that local market. They are selling into the global remote market, and they know it.

The gap is not small. Stack Overflow’s 2025 Developer Survey, which asks developers directly what they earn, puts the median for an engineering manager in India at roughly $52,000 and an architect at roughly $46,500. Salary aggregators that scrape local job ads put the average Indian developer somewhere between $8,000 and $14,000. Both can be true at the same time, because they are measuring different people. The survey skews toward globally connected, English-speaking developers, which is very close to the exact population you are trying to hire.

So: use the table to rank countries against each other, then expect to pay a real premium over the local average for anyone who clears a Western senior bar. Budgeting at the local average and then wondering why nobody good replies is the single most common way these projects fail.

Salary is not your cost

The wage is the start of the bill, not the end. Two things stack on top of it.

1. Employer contributions. These are statutory, and they vary a lot:

• Brazil: employer social security (INSS) is a flat 20% of payroll (22.5% in some sectors), plus FGTS deposits of 8% of monthly pay.
• India: employer provident fund is 12% of salary, matching the employee’s 12%. The pension slice is calculated on salary capped at INR 15,000 per month, so on a high salary the effective cost is lower than a flat 12% suggests.
• The Philippines: employer SSS is 10% of the monthly salary credit (the employee pays 5%), and that salary credit is capped, so the peso amount tops out instead of scaling with a big salary.

2. The EOR fee, if you use one. A per-employee fee is regressive: it is the same whether the salary is $12,000 or $120,000, so it eats a far bigger share of a low wage. Run the arithmetic per country before you commit. The country that looks cheapest on wage alone is not automatically the cheapest all in.

These numbers move

Two entries deserve an asterisk. Argentina has been through severe inflation and peso devaluation, and local-currency salary figures there go stale within months. Argentine developers increasingly price in USD for exactly that reason. Ukraine is still a deep and genuinely strong engineering market, but the war adds continuity risk (mobilisation, power cuts, air raids) that no wage table can express. Neither is a reason to rule the country out. Both are reasons to check live figures instead of trusting a table.

To find and hire these tech talents you can use the following tools:

Find and engage

First off, you need to find these tech talents who are spread across the globe. A talent search engine can help you find the best talent across the globe based on their profiles and your job description.

Best for find and engaging candidates:

HeroHunt.ai

• Finds 1 billion candidates worldwide
• Finds contact details
• Enables personalized outreach at scale

Hire and pay

When you found and engaged the right people, you need to hire them and pay them. There are three realistic routes, and the right one depends on the numbers above.

• Set up your own legal entity in the country. Highest fixed cost and the most admin, but the cheapest per head once you are hiring a real team there. Rarely worth it below roughly five people in one country.
• Hire on a contract (freelancers). Cheapest and fastest. The catch is misclassification: if you direct someone’s hours, tools and priorities like an employee, many of these countries will treat them as one, and the back taxes and penalties land on you.
• Use an Employer of Record. An EOR hires the candidate for you through its own local entity, compliantly, and bills you. You trade a per-employee fee for not owning the compliance risk. One thing to check per country before you sign: a headline “150+ countries” usually covers contractor payments, while EOR itself runs on the provider’s own local entities. In the smaller markets on this list, that can mean a partner entity rather than the provider’s own, which is worth asking about directly.

Best for hiring and paying:

Deel

• Hires and pays compliantly in 150+ countries by its own published count
• Onboards employees or contractors in minutes
• Handles local benefits, contracts and statutory contributions for you