Most pages about software development cost in Vietnam lead with hourly rate ranges. This one starts from official wage statistics for the US, the UK and Australia, plus ITviec's annual Vietnamese IT salary survey, to show how big the gap is in each market, how much of it survives once employer costs are added, and where it shrinks.
We are a Vietnamese vendor, so read this knowing which side of the table we sit on. We don't publish our own prices here or anywhere else. Every figure below is public market data with a link, and none of it is a MOHA rate.
Software development cost in Vietnam and at home: the official pay data
Each country's statistics office publishes a median for the occupation closest to "software developer." For Vietnam we use ITviec's annual survey.
| Country | Source and occupation | Median pay, local currency | Approx. USD per year | Multiple of Vietnam |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | BLS, software developers, May 2025 | $135,980 per year | $135,980 | 7.2x |
| Australia | Jobs and Skills Australia (ABS data), software and applications programmers, May 2025 | A$2,537 per week, full time | $87,100 | 4.6x |
| United Kingdom | ONS ASHE 2025 (provisional), programmers and software development professionals, full time | £56,914 per year | $72,700 | 3.9x |
| Vietnam | ITviec 2025-2026, back-end developer | 37.8 million VND per month | $18,800 | 1x |
Sources: the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook, the UK Office for National Statistics ASHE Table 14, the Jobs and Skills Australia occupation profile, which draws on the Australian Bureau of Statistics Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours, and ITviec's IT Salary & Recruitment Market Report 2025-2026, built on 1,839 survey responses.
How we got to dollars: the Australian weekly figure is multiplied by 52 and the Vietnamese monthly figure by 12. Everything is converted at the World Bank's 2024 average official exchange rates, the latest year it publishes for all three currencies: 24,165 dong, 0.782 pounds and 1.515 Australian dollars per US dollar.
So a US company is looking at roughly a sevenfold salary gap, an Australian company at four and a half times, and a UK company at just under four. That difference between buyers gets lost when a comparison uses only US numbers. If you are in London, your business case is built on a gap about half the size of the one a San Francisco CTO sees.
The four sources also don't measure quite the same thing. The three government series come from employer surveys. ITviec is a self-reported survey of people active on a job platform. Treat the multiples as good to one significant figure.
Seniority changes the ratio more than anything else
A median hides the spread, and the spread is wide in Vietnam. ITviec breaks the back-end developer median down by years of experience:
| Experience (Vietnam, back-end) | Median per month | Approx. USD per year | US median is | UK median is | Australian median is |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 1 year | 12.4 million VND | $6,200 | 22x | 11.8x | 14.1x |
| 1-2 years | 25.35 million VND | $12,600 | 10.8x | 5.8x | 6.9x |
| 3-4 years | 30.1 million VND | $14,900 | 9.1x | 4.9x | 5.8x |
| 5-8 years | 39.9 million VND | $19,800 | 6.9x | 3.7x | 4.4x |
| Over 8 years | 54.9 million VND | $27,300 | 5.0x | 2.7x | 3.2x |
An engineer with more than eight years earns about 4.4 times what a newcomer earns. In the US, BLS reports that the lowest-paid 10% of software developers earn under $82,460 and the highest-paid 10% over $214,670, a spread of 2.6 times. The UK's ASHE table shows £32,835 at the 10th percentile and £102,860 at the 90th, about 3.1 times. Experience bands and pay percentiles aren't the same measure, but the direction is clear enough: pay rises with experience faster in Vietnam than it does at home.
Two things follow.
First, compare like with like. Set a Vietnamese senior against your own median and the US gap falls to five times and the UK gap to 2.7. Set that senior against your own top decile and it widens again, to about 7.9 times for the US and 4.8 for the UK. Matching Vietnam's 1-2 year band against the bottom decile gives roughly 6.5 times for the US and 3.3 for the UK. Whichever band you pick, the US ratio stays near seven and the UK ratio near four, provided both sides are the same seniority.
Second, team mix drives cost. A team of seniors with one mid-level engineer costs far more than the median suggests, and a team padded with juniors costs far less and delivers less. When someone quotes you "a Vietnam developer," the first thing to pin down is how many years that developer has.
What employers pay on top of salary in each country
Salary is the largest line but an employer pays more than salary everywhere. These are the statutory or measured additions in each country.
| Country | Employer cost on top of pay | Source |
|---|---|---|
| United States | About 21% for insurance, retirement and legally required benefits (measured, professional occupations in private industry, June 2026) | BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, Table 4 |
| United Kingdom | 15% employer National Insurance on earnings above £5,000 a year, plus a minimum 3% workplace pension contribution on qualifying earnings | GOV.UK rates and thresholds 2025 to 2026, GOV.UK workplace pensions |
| Australia | 12% superannuation guarantee from 1 July 2025 | Australian Taxation Office |
| Vietnam | 21.5% employer contributions: 17.5% social insurance, 3% health insurance, 1% unemployment insurance, on a capped salary base | PwC Worldwide Tax Summaries, Vietnam |
The US row needs a note. BLS measures what private employers spend per hour worked. For professional occupations in June 2026, insurance was 7.4% of total compensation, retirement and savings 3.7% and legally required benefits 6.5%. Set against wages, paid leave and supplemental pay, that comes to about 21%, which is our calculation from the table. The UK, Australian and Vietnamese rows are legal minimums only. Private health cover, state payroll taxes in Australia and anything above the pension minimum come on top.
Apply those rates to the medians in the first table and the picture barely moves:
- US: about $165,200 per developer per year
- Australia: about $97,500 (superannuation only)
- UK: about $82,700 (National Insurance only, which works out at 13.7% of the median salary)
- Vietnam: about $22,800
The loaded multiples come out at 7.2 for the US, 4.3 for Australia and 3.6 for the UK. Employer on-costs run between 12% and 22% in all four countries, so they push both sides up by a similar amount. The gap narrows only when you add what a vendor puts on top of the Vietnamese salary.
Why a vendor fee is not a salary
A vendor's fee for one engineer has to carry all of this:
- The engineer's salary and the 21.5% statutory contributions above.
- Paid leave and public holidays, which are paid for but produce no billable work.
- Office space, a laptop, licenses and security tooling.
- Recruiting: sourcing, interviews, and the offers that get turned down.
- Bench time, when the vendor keeps people on payroll between engagements so a team can start without a hiring cycle.
- Attrition. When someone leaves, the vendor absorbs the search and the handover.
- Management that isn't billed as a seat: delivery managers, HR, finance, and often part of a tech lead's or QA lead's attention.
- Tax and the vendor's margin.
You carry most of these same costs for your own staff. They sit in other budgets (HR, facilities, IT, the engineering manager's calendar), so they rarely appear in a "cost per developer" figure. A vendor fee puts them on one invoice. This is why comparing a quote with a salary survey will always make the quote look expensive, and comparing it with your loaded cost per head gives a fairer answer.
The whole-team view: a worked example
One of our published projects, the COMY language learning LMS, ran with one PM, two back-end developers, one front-end developer, one QA engineer and one UI/UX designer. Take the four engineering seats, for which every source above has a figure, and price them as salaries only.
| Four seats: 2 back-end, 1 front-end, 1 QA | Salary total per year | Approx. USD | Multiple of Vietnam |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vietnam (ITviec medians: 37.8, 37.8, 34.8 and 28.8 million VND per month) | 1,670 million VND | $69,100 | 1x |
| United States (three developers at $135,980, one QA analyst at $104,300) | $512,240 | $512,200 | 7.4x |
| Australia (four seats at the programmer median) | A$527,696 | $348,200 | 5.0x |
| United Kingdom (three at £56,914, one IT quality and testing professional at £47,118) | £217,860 | $278,400 | 4.0x |
These are market salary medians, not what that project cost and not a MOHA price. Jobs and Skills Australia has no separate tester figure in this occupation group, so the Australian row uses the programmer median for all four seats.
Put another way, the median salaries of all four Vietnamese engineers add up to about half of one US developer's median salary, about 79% of one Australian programmer's and about 95% of one UK programmer's.
Now the in-house side, which is where most spreadsheets stop too early. To have those four people working in your own office you also pay for:
- the employer on-costs in the table above
- recruiting, through agency fees or your team's interview hours, for four hires
- the months when seats are empty during hiring, and again whenever someone resigns
- equipment, office space and software for four more people
- a manager's time for four more direct reports
None of these has a single public number, so we leave them out of the arithmetic. They all push the in-house total up.
That gives a simple rule. Call the loaded multiple for your country your headroom: about 7.2 for the US, 4.3 for Australia and 3.6 for the UK. That figure is how many times the Vietnamese loaded salary your own loaded cost is. Every layer in a vendor fee has to fit inside it before an offshore seat costs the same as a local hire, and the in-house extras listed above move the break-even further out. A US buyer has a lot of room. A UK buyer has about half as much, so team mix and what the fee includes matter more.
Where the saving shrinks
The ratios above are the favorable case, and several things reduce them.
Senior-heavy teams. If every seat is an engineer with eight or more years, use the bottom row of the seniority table and compare it with your own senior pay.
Your own time. An offshore team needs a product owner on your side every week. If that person is your CTO, their hours belong in the model. For US teams the working-day overlap with Hanoi is short, which makes written specs and handoffs part of the cost. We cover that trade-off in nearshore vs offshore software development.
Very small or very short engagements. Onboarding and coordination are roughly fixed costs. Spread over one person for three months they weigh heavily, and over five people for a year they nearly disappear. For a single specialist, staff augmentation is usually the cleaner arrangement, and we compare the two in staff augmentation vs full outsourcing.
Exchange rates. The pound averaged 0.782 per dollar in 2024 and 0.759 in 2025 on World Bank data, which moves the UK figure by about 3% with no change in anyone's pay. The Australian dollar moved about 2% the other way. Rerun the conversion at today's rate before the numbers go to your board.
The first month. A new team is slower while it learns your codebase, wherever it sits. Budget for that month at reduced output.
How to read a quote for a Vietnam team
A proposal for a Vietnam team is easier to judge with the tables above next to it. When you receive one, including ours, read it this way.
- Find the seniority behind each seat. The salary table shows pay roughly doubling between the 1-2 year band and the over-8 band, and a fee should move with it. Ask us for years of experience per role.
- List what the fee includes. Go through the layers in the vendor-fee section and tick them off: leave cover, equipment, recruiting, replacement when someone leaves, delivery management. Ask us which are in the monthly fee and which are billed separately.
- Compare the team with your loaded cost. Use salary plus employer on-costs plus your recruiting and management overhead, per seat, per year. Your finance team has these numbers.
- Check the currency and the adjustment terms. A fee fixed in US dollars means you carry the pound or Australian dollar risk. Ask how and when fees are reviewed.
- Work out your headroom. Divide your loaded annual cost per seat by the quoted annual fee per seat. If the result is close to 1, the decision rests on speed and hiring capacity, since cost no longer separates the options.
Team size and duration decide how the fixed costs spread. Our Laos Edu platform, for example, was built by a team of 10 over six months, a shape where onboarding is a small share of the total. A long-running product team is what an offshore development center in Vietnam is designed for, and it is the model where the ratios in this article hold up most reliably.
FAQ
How much cheaper is a software developer in Vietnam than in the US?
On median salary, about one-seventh. ITviec's 2025-2026 back-end median converts to roughly $18,800 a year against the BLS median of $135,980 for May 2025. That is a salary comparison. A vendor's fee sits well above the Vietnamese salary because it carries employer contributions, management, recruiting, bench and margin.
Is the saving the same for UK and Australian companies?
No. UK and Australian developer pay is lower than US pay in dollar terms, so the gap is smaller: about 3.9 times for the UK and 4.6 times for Australia on the medians above. The saving is still real, but the quote needs a closer read on seniority and inclusions.
Why is an offshore quote higher than Vietnamese salary data suggests?
Because the quote is a fee for a managed, employed, replaceable engineer and the survey figure is one person's salary. Vietnamese employers pay 21.5% in statutory contributions before anything else, and the vendor adds office, equipment, recruiting, management and bench time.
Does MOHA publish its rates?
No. Two teams of the same size can differ a lot in cost once roles, years of experience and duration are set, so we discuss cost per engagement. Tell us the team you have in mind and we'll talk it through.
Next step
If you want to put real numbers against your own loaded cost per seat, contact us and describe the team you need. We'll discuss it with you.
