The short answer
If you hire a typical SDR in the US, plan on roughly $120,000 or more in year-one cost before you buy a single tool, and expect only about nine months of full productivity out of that year. That number comes from three public sources: The Bridge Group's SDR compensation research, the Bureau of Labor Statistics data on what employers pay on top of wages, and SHRM's cost-per-hire benchmark.
That does not mean outsourcing always wins. It means you should compare the real number, not the salary on the job post. Below is the math line by line, then an honest list of when an in-house hire is the better choice.
Line 1: base salary and commission
The Bridge Group's 2025 SDR research, based on a survey of more than 350 B2B companies, puts median SDR on-target earnings at $80,000, split roughly $55,000 base and $25,000 variable. Variable pay is usually tied to meetings held or pipeline created.
Two things to note. First, that is a median. In high-cost metros like the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles or Austin, you will often pay more to get a rep who has done the job before. Second, if your SDR hits target, you pay the full $80,000. That is the point of the plan, so budget for it.
Line 2: payroll taxes and benefits
Salary is not what an employee costs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks this in its Employer Costs for Employee Compensation survey. In June 2026, for full-time private industry workers, wages and salaries were 68.5 percent of total compensation cost and benefits were the other 31.5 percent.
Benefits in that survey include paid leave, health insurance, retirement contributions and legally required benefits: Social Security, Medicare, federal and state unemployment insurance and workers' compensation. In the June 2025 release, legally required benefits alone averaged $3.31 per hour worked for private industry workers, on total compensation of $45.65.
Apply the full-time ratio to an $80,000 OTE and the total compensation cost is about $116,800, which means roughly $36,800 on top of pay. Your number will vary with your health plan and state, but the ratio is a fair starting point.
Line 3: recruiting
SHRM's 2025 benchmarking data put the average cost per hire for non-executive roles at $5,475. That covers job ads, recruiter time, assessments and similar costs. If you use an agency recruiter, expect more.
The cost SHRM does not count is your time. A founder or sales manager screening resumes, running interviews and checking references for an SDR is spending hours that should go to selling.
Line 4: the tool stack
An SDR without tools is a person with a phone. A working outbound seat usually needs:
- A CRM seat (HubSpot, Salesforce, GoHighLevel or Zoho).
- A dialer (Aircall, RingCentral, Dialpad or a power dialer like Mojo).
- Contact data (Apollo.io or a similar database) and email verification.
- A sequencing tool for email and follow-up (Outreach, Salesloft or Lemlist).
- A scheduling link (Calendly or the one in your CRM).
We are not going to quote vendor prices here because they change constantly and depend on your contract. Get quotes for each line and add them. For many small teams this is a meaningful monthly line, not a rounding error.
Line 5: ramp time and turnover, the hidden costs
This is where most budgets go wrong. The Bridge Group's 2025 research reports an average SDR ramp time of 3.0 months and average tenure of 1.9 years. Both numbers are the best the industry has posted in years, and they still hurt.
- Ramp: for about a quarter of year one, you are paying full cost for partial output. Your rep is learning the product, the ICP, the objections and your CRM.
- Turnover: with average tenure under two years, a good share of SDRs leave or get promoted inside two years. Then you pay recruiting and ramp again, and the pipeline dips while the seat is empty.
- Management: someone has to coach calls, review lists, test scripts and check CRM hygiene. If that is the founder, it is the most expensive hour in the company.
The year-one math in one table
| Cost line | Year-one estimate | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Base salary | $55,000 | Bridge Group 2025 median |
| Variable pay at target | $25,000 | Bridge Group 2025 median |
| Benefits and payroll taxes | about $36,800 | BLS ECEC full-time ratio, June 2026 |
| Recruiting | about $5,475 | SHRM 2025 average cost per hire |
| Tools | Your vendor quotes | CRM, dialer, data, sequencing |
| Manager time | Your number | Coaching, list and script work |
| Total before tools and management | about $122,000 |
Now divide by output. With a three-month ramp, you get about nine months of full productivity in year one. Effectively, you are paying roughly $122,000 plus tools for nine productive months, and you have a real chance of doing it all again in year two.
What you actually buy when you outsource
An outsourced SDR replaces most of those lines with one monthly fee. You skip recruiting, benefits, payroll taxes and most of the tool stack. You still need to give the team your offer, your ICP and access to your CRM, and the first two to four weeks go to building lists and testing scripts.
What you should demand from any agency, including us:
- Named people on your account, not a rotating pool.
- Every call, email and meeting logged in your CRM, so the data stays yours.
- A written qualification standard, such as BANT, agreed before launch.
- A weekly report with activity, conversations, meetings held and pipeline, not just dials.
- Short terms. If it is not working, you should not be locked in for a year.
Our team is three partners based in Nigeria working US business hours, which is a big part of why the cost is lower than a US hire. Before Trifecta, Cynthia Akubue set appointments for a California AI company at more than 300 outbound calls a day, Sylvia Owunnachika cold called US business owners and got past gatekeepers to hit daily booking targets, and Safiya Abdulsalam converted inbound MQLs into SQLs for a US business-services firm. See what each package includes.
When hiring in-house is the better choice
Being honest about this saves everyone time. Hire your own SDR if:
- Your product is highly technical and buyers expect the first caller to talk architecture, integrations or compliance in depth.
- You are building an AE bench. Many companies use the SDR role to grow future closers. An agency cannot be promoted.
- You already have a sales manager and a working playbook with proven scripts and lists. Then ramp is faster and coaching is covered.
- You need three or more reps long term. At that scale, the fixed cost of a manager and tools spreads out.
- Your buyers expect a local presence, for example field visits or in-person events in your metro as part of prospecting.
Outsourcing tends to win when you need pipeline in the next 60 days, you do not have a sales manager, you are testing a new market or state, or the last in-house hire left after a year and took the know-how with them. Many companies do both: an agency to prove the motion, then an internal hire once the scripts and lists work.