Should I Hire an IT Person or Outsource? A Straight Answer

Usually neither, on its own. The first IT hire is the most expensive way to answer the wrong question, because most owners are trying to fill one role that is actually three separate jobs: helpdesk, projects, and decisions. Hire one generalist to cover all three and you overpay for the parts they're weak at and get nothing for the part that matters most. Split the jobs first, then decide route by route.

What job are you actually hiring for?#

Owners searching "should I hire an IT person or outsource" are usually picturing one role. There are three, and they want different people, different contracts, and different money.

Helpdesk. The printer that won't print, the password reset, the laptop that won't boot, the new starter who needs an account by Monday. Reactive, constant, and genuinely commodity work — it doesn't need your best thinker, it needs coverage and a fast response. This is what an MSP (managed service provider) is built for.

Projects. The migration, the new finance system, the website rebuild, the office move that needs everything re-cabled and re-configured. Defined start, defined end, defined deliverable. This is contract work — you don't need it on the payroll permanently, you need it done well once.

Decisions. Which software to buy, whether a supplier's quote is fair, whether you're actually secure or just told you are, what to do about AI, what happens if a key supplier vanishes overnight. Ongoing, judgement-based, and — this is the part owners miss — nobody's job. A helpdesk hire won't touch it; a project contractor is scoped to their one project and gone. Most 1-20 staff businesses have no one whose job it is to own these calls, so they get made badly, late, or by whoever's loudest in the room (often a vendor's salesperson).

That gap is the actual problem behind "should I hire an IT person or outsource." A single hire, however good, is built to plug one or two of the three — usually helpdesk and a bit of projects. The decisions gap stays open whichever way you answer the headline question.

What does each route actually cost?#

Numbers first, because owners routinely underestimate the salaried option by ignoring everything except the payslip.

The salary figure is only the start of the salaried-hire cost, and this is where the comparison usually goes wrong. On top of £55,000 you add employer National Insurance — 15% on earnings above the £5,000 secondary threshold for 2026/27 (HMRC rates and thresholds for employers), which is roughly £7,500 on that salary alone. Then employer pension contributions on top of the statutory minimum, a laptop and software licences, recruitment fees or the weeks of your time spent interviewing, and — the one nobody prices — the four to eight weeks after they start when they're still learning your systems and delivering less than a contractor would from day one. A realistic all-in figure for one salaried IT manager sits well north of £65,000 in year one, before you've asked them a single strategic question.

An MSP contract avoids most of that on-cost because you're buying a service, not a person — no recruitment, no notice period, no single point of learning curve. What it doesn't buy is anyone accountable for whether your technology spend or your security posture is actually right; that's not the job you're paying for.

An advisory retainer is the cheapest of the three in absolute terms precisely because it's scoped to the one job that doesn't need full-time coverage: someone senior enough to make and review decisions doesn't need to be in the building forty hours a week to do it well.

What happens if your one IT hire leaves?#

There's a fourth cost the table doesn't show, and it only shows up the day someone hands in their notice. When a single person has been quietly absorbing all three jobs — the passwords, the vendor relationships, the "why we set it up this way" — their knowledge leaves with them. Nothing was ever written down because there was never a second person to write it down for. The replacement search starts from zero, usually while something urgent is already broken. This single-point-of-failure risk is the strongest argument against solving "helpdesk, projects and decisions" with one generalist hire, however good they are while they're still there: concentrating all three jobs in one person concentrates all the risk in one person too.

How do most businesses actually combine these three routes?#

The honest answer to "hire or outsource" is neither in isolation — it's a combination, and which combination depends on size and how much is already broken.

• Under about 10 staff: an MSP for helpdesk, contractors called in per project, and an advisory retainer for the decisions that would otherwise fall to whoever's most confident with a laptop. No salaried IT role at all.
• 10-20 staff, growing: the same shape, but the advisory relationship starts doing more — reviewing the MSP's renewal quotes, vetting the next system purchase, sanity-checking what "we should use AI for this" actually means for your business. Still no full-time hire, because the volume of helpdesk tickets rarely justifies one before 20+ staff.
• Past 20-25 staff, or after a bad year: this is usually where a first IT hire starts to make sense — enough volume that a dedicated person earns their keep on helpdesk and projects alone. Even then, most businesses this size keep an outside advisory relationship for the decisions a single employee, however senior, shouldn't be marking their own homework on (is the security posture actually adequate, is this supplier quote fair).

If you're weighing an outsourced IT director against a salaried hire specifically, the deciding question is usually whether you need a CTO at all — most 1-20 staff businesses need a few hours a month of senior judgement, not a full-time executive.

Common questions#

Can one MSP contract cover the decisions job too? Some will say yes and sell it as part of the package, but the incentives don't line up: an MSP is paid to keep tickets resolved and infrastructure running, not to tell you their own renewal quote is high or that you don't need the upsell they're pitching. Decisions need someone without a stake in the answer.

Isn't a generalist IT hire cheaper than paying for three things separately? On paper, sometimes. In practice you're paying one salary to get partial coverage of three different skill sets, and the part that suffers first is almost always the strategic one — a helpdesk-minded hire under day-to-day pressure rarely has the time or the remit to step back and question the technology spend.

How do I vet whoever ends up owning the decisions job, if it's not an employee? The same way you'd vet any consultant before handing over that much trust — there's a checklist for exactly this.

What if we already have an IT person and I think this is the gap they're not covering? That's common, and it isn't a reflection on them — it's usually a scope problem, not a competence one. Adding an outside advisory relationship alongside an existing hire, rather than instead of one, is one of the more common shapes this takes.

If the decisions job is the one nobody in your business currently owns, that's what an outsourced IT director does — worth a conversation before your next hire, not after.