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What Does Full-Time Recruitment Cost Irish Companies in India?
- Saransh Garg
- Aug 19
- 11 min read
A full-time software engineer hire in Dublin now runs an Irish company somewhere between €55,000 and €95,000 in gross salary alone, depending on seniority. Add employer PRSI at 11.05%, pension contributions, health cover, and a recruitment agency fee of 15 to 20% of first-year salary, and the true first-year cost of one hire climbs past €100,000 for a mid-to-senior role.
We've run this exact comparison for eleven Irish clients over the last two years, and the full-time recruitment cost Irish companies in India face, even after EOR fees, statutory Indian benefits, and our own placement fee, typically lands 45 to 60% lower than the equivalent Dublin hire, while staying fully compliant on both sides of the relationship. This isn't a rough estimate. Below is exactly how we build that number for clients, role by role.
Why Are Irish Companies Turning to India for Full-Time Engineering Hires?
Dublin's tech corridor around Grand Canal Dock and the Silicon Docks, home to Google, Meta, Stripe, Workday, and a dense cluster of well-funded SaaS scaleups, has created one of the tightest engineering labour markets in Europe. IDA Ireland's own investment pipeline keeps adding multinational headcount into the same city where domestic scaleups are also hiring, and the result is a bidding war for mid-to-senior backend, DevOps, and data engineers that most 20 to 50 person Irish companies simply cannot win on salary alone.
We've watched this play out directly. A Dublin-based fintech client came to us after losing two senior engineers to a US multinational offering a 30% pay bump within the same postal code. Their board's first instinct was to raise salaries again, a short-term fix that compounds every hiring cycle. Instead, we restructured their next four hires as an India-based engineering pod, working IST hours with a 3.5-hour overlap into the Irish afternoon.
Irish tech unemployment has stayed under 3% for most of the last two hiring cycles, and the Central Statistics Office has repeatedly flagged software and ICT roles as the tightest sub-sector in the country's labour market. That scarcity is exactly why more Irish companies, not just VC-backed scaleups but established SMEs in fintech, medtech, and logistics software, treat India not as an outsourcing fallback but as a genuine second engineering base.
AI-assisted development, platform engineering, and cloud cost optimisation have also become standard line items in job specs this cycle, and Indian engineering hubs have scaled talent pools in exactly those areas faster than most European markets have.
Which Indian Cities Offer the Best Talent for Full-Time Roles Irish Companies Need?
Bengaluru remains our first recommendation for Irish clients hiring full-time product engineers, because it carries the deepest concentration of engineers with prior product-company experience. Flipkart, Swiggy, Razorpay, and a long list of Series B to D SaaS companies train engineers to think in terms of ownership and metrics, not just ticket completion. Pune runs a close second, particularly for fintech and insurtech roles, given its strong base of engineers who've worked inside BFSI-adjacent product companies. Hyderabad has become our default recommendation for data engineering and platform roles, driven by the density of GCCs from firms like Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce that have trained a large pool of engineers on enterprise-grade cloud infrastructure.
What Indian engineers consistently bring to Irish product teams is strong fundamentals in cloud-native architecture. Most candidates we shortlist for Irish clients already carry AWS or Azure certifications and have shipped production code on distributed systems, since Indian product companies scaled fast enough to force that experience early in a career. What they typically lack, and what almost every Irish CTO asks us about directly, is exposure to GDPR-first data handling and EU-specific compliance thinking. Indian product companies build for scale first and data residency second, which is the reverse of how an Irish or EU-facing engineering team needs to think.
We test for this gap specifically rather than assume it away. Every full-time candidate we shortlist for an Irish client goes through a scenario-based technical round where we present a data-handling decision with a GDPR trade-off baked in, for example, whether to log a customer's IP address for debugging, and we score not just the technical answer but whether the candidate flags the compliance question inaccurated.
What Legal Rules Govern Full-Time Recruitment Cost for Irish Companies in India?
On the Irish side, once you're hiring full-time, even for a role physically based in India but reporting into an Irish entity, you need clarity on which jurisdiction's employment protections apply. If the engineer is legally employed and paid in India (the model we run for almost all our Irish clients), Irish statutes like the Unfair Dismissals Acts 1977 to 2015 and the Employment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act 2018 do not apply to that employment relationship. Indian law governs it instead.
On the India side, a full-time hire made through an Employer of Record (EOR) is bound by the Payment of Bonus Act, the Employees' Provident Funds and Miscellaneous Provisions Act (EPF, 12% employer contribution), and, for tenure of five years or more, the Payment of Gratuity Act. State-level Shops and Establishments Acts also govern working hours, leave entitlement, and termination notice, and these vary meaningfully between Karnataka, Telangana, and Maharashtra, which is exactly why the city you hire in changes your compliance obligations, not just your talent pool.
The mistake we see most often from Irish companies new to this model is assuming that hiring through an Employer of Record (EOR) in India means Indian statutory costs disappear because "it's not our entity." They don't disappear. EPF, gratuity accrual, and statutory bonus are all still legally owed to the employee and factored into the EOR's monthly invoice. Companies that quote a salary-only number to their board and then get surprised by the full loaded cost three months in are the single most common support call our team at AnjuSmriti Global fields from new Irish clients. Getting this number right upfront is the entire point of building an accurate full-time recruitment cost Irish companies in India projection before you sign anything.
Building this business case properly can take a few extra steps up front. If you'd rather have the exact figures built for your specific role, start with a short form here and we'll return a projection you can bring straight to your board.
Contract Hiring vs Full-Time Hiring: Which Model Fits Your Team?
Irish companies exploring India often start by asking whether a contract hire or a full-time hire is the better first move, and the honest answer depends on how long the need will last. Contract hiring works well when a company needs a specific skill set for a defined project, wants to test a candidate or a market before committing, or needs to move fast without setting up long-term statutory obligations like gratuity accrual. It's typically faster to onboard and easier to wind down.
Full-time hiring, by contrast, makes sense when the role is core to the product roadmap and the company wants continuity, institutional knowledge, and a team member who's invested in outcomes over multiple years. Most of the Irish clients we work with start with one or two contract hires to validate that an India-based team can integrate with their workflow and timezone overlap, then convert successful contractors, or hire fresh, into full-time roles once they're confident in the model.
The full-time recruitment cost Irish companies in India ultimately pay is higher per head than a contract engagement in the short term, because of EPF, gratuity, and EOR management fees, but it usually works out cheaper over an 18-month-plus horizon once you factor in re-hiring and onboarding costs that come with repeatedly refreshing a contract bench.
Dublin vs India: A Full-Time Hiring Cost Comparison Table
This is the table our Irish clients screenshot and bring into their own board decks. Figures are annual, fully loaded (salary plus statutory employer costs plus our fees), for a backend or DevOps engineer role, current as of our latest client mandates.
Seniority | Dublin: Base Salary | Dublin: Fully Loaded Cost* | India (EOR): Base CTC | India: Fully Loaded Cost** |
Mid (3 to 5 yrs) | €55,000 to €65,000 | €90,000 to €105,000 | ₹14 to 18 lakh (~€15,500 to €20,000) | €22,000 to €27,000 |
Senior (6 to 9 yrs) | €70,000 to €85,000 | €112,000 to €135,000 | ₹28 to 38 lakh (~€31,000 to €42,000) | €41,000 to €52,000 |
Lead/Staff (10+ yrs) | €95,000 to €115,000 | €150,000 to €180,000 | ₹48 to 65 lakh (~€53,000 to €72,000) | €65,000 to €85,000 |
Includes 11.05% employer PRSI, standard pension match, and a one-time 18% recruitment agency fee amortised into year one. *Includes EPF (12% employer), gratuity accrual, EOR management fee (typically 10 to 15% of CTC), and our one-time placement fee.
Across all three levels, the fully loaded India cost sits between 50% and 57% lower than the equivalent Dublin hire in year one, even with every statutory Indian benefit and our own fee included. This is the real, apples-to-apples full-time recruitment cost Irish companies in India actually pay, not a headline "cheaper labour" claim.
How Is Full-Time Recruitment Cost Structured by Seniority Level in India?
Breaking the India-side number down further, a mid-level engineer's CTC of ₹14 to 18 lakh typically includes a base of roughly ₹11 to 14 lakh, EPF employer contribution of 12% on basic pay, and statutory bonus. Our EOR partner fee adds 10 to 15% of CTC monthly, and our one-time placement fee is typically one month's CTC-equivalent, spread across the first three invoices so clients don't face a cash-flow spike at hire. For senior and lead roles, the same structure applies, but gratuity accrual becomes a more material line item once you're planning for multi-year retention, which most of our Irish clients are.
What we consistently see Irish clients do with the savings is not simply bank the margin. The most common pattern across our mandates is reinvesting it into headcount, typically hiring 1.6 to 1.8 India-based engineers for the fully loaded cost of one Dublin hire, which lets a 70-person company run genuine two-shift development coverage without the payroll strain of doing the same thing entirely in Dublin. A smaller number of clients, mostly at Series A stage, use the delta to extend runway by four to six months instead, which their finance heads have told us directly changed their next fundraise conversation.
What Does Our Hiring Process Look Like for Irish Companies?
For Irish clients, our standard timeline runs three weeks from kickoff call to first shortlist of five to six vetted candidates, and six to eight weeks to a signed offer and start date. That's slower than pure contract hiring because full-time roles require a deeper cultural and long-term fit assessment, but it's still faster than most Irish companies' own domestic hiring cycles.
Every candidate goes through a three-stage technical assessment: a take-home system design exercise scored against the specific stack the client uses, a live pairing session with one of our own senior technical assessors, and, for senior and lead roles, a scenario round covering the GDPR and compliance gap described earlier.
A concrete example: a Dublin-based insurtech company, roughly 70 employees, came to AnjuSmriti Global needing to build out a four-person platform engineering team within a quarter, after their Series B term sheet included an aggressive product roadmap their existing six-person Dublin team couldn't deliver alone. We recommended a Pune-based pod given the fintech-adjacent talent density there.
The mandate almost went sideways in week five: our first candidate for the lead role accepted verbally and then received a competing counter-offer from a Bengaluru unicorn mid-onboarding. Because we run parallel backup shortlists on every lead-level mandate as standard practice, we had a second candidate, three years' less experience but strong system design scores, in front of the client within 48 hours, and the full four-person team was onboarded and shipping code by week seven.
Fourteen months later, that team has shipped the client's core claims-automation module, and the client's fully loaded engineering cost for that pod runs 52% below what four equivalent Dublin hires would have cost them in year one alone.
Conclusion
Over the next few hiring cycles, we expect more Irish scaleups to move from single contract hires to full-time India-based pods of three to six engineers, driven partly by Dublin salary inflation showing no sign of easing and partly by Irish boards now being comfortable with the EOR compliance model after several years of it becoming mainstream. AI tooling is changing what a "full-time" role looks like too: Irish CTOs are increasingly asking for engineers who can pair with AI coding assistants and own end-to-end delivery, rather than narrow specialists, and Indian hubs have adapted their training pipelines around that shift faster than most talent markets.
If you want that number built for your specific role and seniority level, get your custom cost breakdown here.
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FAQs
1.Does the Unfair Dismissals Act apply to a full-time engineer we hire in India through an EOR?
No. If the engineer is legally employed by our EOR partner in India and paid on an Indian payroll, the Unfair Dismissals Acts 1977 to 2015 and related Irish employment protections don't extend to that relationship. Indian employment law governs instead, including Shops and Establishments Act notice periods and the Industrial Disputes Act where applicable. This changes how termination, notice, and severance work compared to a Dublin hire, and getting it wrong in an offer letter can create real legal exposure later.
2.How does PRSI compare to statutory contributions for an India-based full-time hire?
Irish employer PRSI runs at 11.05% for most salary bands above the lower threshold, applied on gross salary. The Indian equivalent isn't a single line item. It's EPF at 12% of basic pay, plus statutory bonus, plus gratuity accrual for tenure beyond five years. The two aren't directly comparable percentage-for-percentage because Indian basic pay is often structured as 40 to 50% of total CTC, so the effective statutory load ends up lower in absolute terms even though the headline rate looks similar.
3.Can an Irish company retain IP rights over code written by a full-time engineer employed through an Indian EOR?
Yes, but it has to be structured correctly in three places: the EOR's employment contract with the engineer, a separate IP assignment clause naming your Irish entity as beneficial owner, and your own client services agreement with the recruiting partner. Irish companies sometimes skip the middle document and later run into ambiguity during acquisition due diligence. It's a five-minute fix at hiring time and a very expensive one to fix retroactively.
4.Why is Pune a stronger recommendation than Bengaluru for insurtech and fintech roles specifically?
Pune has a denser concentration of engineers with prior experience at BFSI-adjacent product companies and NBFCs, plus several large financial services GCCs that have trained engineers on regulated-industry data handling. Bengaluru has more raw talent volume, but for fintech and insurtech specifically, Pune candidates in our pipelines score higher on compliance-scenario technical rounds without additional prompting.
5.What happens to gratuity and EPF balances if we need to end the engagement within the first year?
EPF contributions vest immediately, and the employee can transfer or withdraw their portion per Indian rules regardless of tenure. Gratuity only becomes payable after five continuous years of service, so a first-year termination carries no gratuity liability. This matters because Irish finance heads sometimes assume gratuity accrues from day one the way certain EU severance provisions do. It doesn't, which changes the real cost of a short-tenure exit.
6.How much timezone overlap can we realistically build into daily standups with an India-based full-time team?
India Standard Time sits 4.5 hours ahead of Irish Summer Time and 5.5 hours ahead of Irish Winter Time. In practice, an Irish team starting at 9am and an Indian team starting at 10am IST gives roughly three to 3.5 hours of live overlap in the Irish morning, enough for a daily standup and ad hoc pairing but not full-day collaborative work. Most clients structure handoff-style workflows for anything beyond that window.
7.Do we need an Irish entity presence in India to hire full-time through an EOR, or can we skip incorporation entirely?
You can skip incorporation entirely for full-time EOR hiring, and that's the core value of the model. The EOR partner is the legal employer of record in India, invoices your Irish entity directly, and handles all statutory filings. Companies typically only need their own Indian entity once headcount grows past roughly 15 to 20 people or they want to establish a formal GCC, which is a separate conversation from the initial full-time hiring stage.
8.What's the realistic timeline from first call to a fully onboarded India-based engineer for an Irish company?
Three weeks to a first shortlist of vetted candidates, five to six weeks to a signed offer, and six to eight weeks total to a confirmed start date, assuming a mid-to-senior single hire. Pods of three or more typically add two to three weeks to account for staggered onboarding and knowledge-transfer scheduling, but parallel shortlists are run specifically to prevent a single candidate drop-out from extending that timeline further.
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