“We need another IT person.” Maybe. But before you post the job, run the actual math — because the sticker price on an IT salary is the smallest number in the equation, and for a lot of Houston businesses the honest answer is that the next $120,000 shouldn't be a hire at all.
Here are the real numbers, with sources, and the framework for deciding.
What IT talent costs in Houston right now
Base salaries, from current compensation data:
- Systems administrator: roughly $90,000–$116,000 base in the Houston market, depending on seniority (Salary.com, ZipRecruiter, 2025–2026 data).
- IT manager: roughly $128,000–$135,000 base (Glassdoor, Salary.com, Indeed — Houston-area figures), typically plus a bonus.
- Information security analyst: $124,910 national median per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — with 29% projected job growth this decade, which means the price is going up, not down.
Those are base numbers. Now load them.
The fully loaded number
Employer payroll taxes, health insurance, retirement match, PTO, training, software licenses, equipment, recruiting fees. Standard estimates derived from federal employer-cost data put the total burden at 25–40% on top of base salary. (That's an industry estimate, not a single citable statistic — but ask your CPA; they'll land in the same range.)
So the realistic all-in cost:
- Mid-level Houston sysadmin: $110,000–$150,000 per year
- IT manager: $160,000–$185,000 per year
- Security analyst: $130,000–$170,000+ per year
And here's the constraint nobody prices in: each of those hires covers about 40 of the week's 168 hours, with one person's skill set, minus PTO, sick days, and turnover risk.
The costs that don't show up on the offer letter
Time-to-fill. ISACA's 2025 State of Cybersecurity survey found roughly half of organizations take six months or more to fill open security positions. The global cybersecurity workforce gap sits at 4.8 million unfilled roles (ISC2). While the req is open, the work you're hiring for isn't happening — that's six-plus months of unpatched exposure and unstarted projects.
The single point of failure. One IT person means one phone that has to ring at 2 a.m., one set of credentials that matter, one resignation letter between you and chaos. When they leave — and the market says they'll get offers — they take undocumented institutional knowledge with them. The replacement costs another six months and another recruiting fee.
The 40-hour ceiling. Hiring a generalist doesn't get you a security operations center, and hiring a security analyst doesn't fix your helpdesk queue. Every hire is one slice of coverage. The breach data shows what that costs: IBM's 2025 report puts the average U.S. data breach at a record $10.22 million, and Verizon's incident data shows 88% of small-business breaches involve ransomware. The gap between “we have an IT guy” and “someone is watching at 2 a.m.” is where those numbers live.
The alternative math
A co-managed IT agreement typically costs a fraction of one fully loaded hire and buys a different shape of coverage entirely: 24/7 monitoring instead of 40 hours, a bench of engineers instead of one skill set, an enterprise security stack — EDR, managed detection, automated patching, tested backup — with zero license purchases, and no recruiting, turnover, or vacation exposure. It starts in weeks, not months. (Our pricing calculator gives a ballpark for your size.)
This is not an argument against your IT staff — it's an argument about what the next dollar should buy. Your current team's institutional knowledge is irreplaceable. The next $130,000 of generalist coverage is not.
When hiring is still the right call
The math points to a hire when the gap is genuinely about dedicated human presence: a second campus that needs hands on site, a manufacturing floor with constant deskside demands, or a leadership gap — if nobody owns IT strategy internally, an IT manager is a better answer than any contract. And at sufficient scale, in-housing specific functions starts beating any provider's price.
The pattern that almost never pays: hiring a second generalist to fix a coverage problem. You'll spend $130,000 to move from 40 covered hours to 40 covered hours with better lunch coverage.
The hybrid that usually wins
The configuration we see work over and over for Houston businesses between 25 and 250 employees: keep (or hire) one strong internal IT lead who owns strategy and knows the business — then surround them with a co-managed agreement that handles monitoring, security, patching, after-hours, and project surge. Total cost: usually less than two fully loaded hires. Total coverage: more than four could deliver.
That's not a sales line; it's an arithmetic result. One person can't cover 168 hours or six specialties, no matter how good they are — and the good ones burn out trying.
Run your own numbers
Take the role you're about to post. Load the salary by a third. Divide by the hours of coverage and the count of skills it actually buys. Then compare it against a scoped co-managed agreement covering the same gaps. We'll happily do that comparison with you, with real numbers on both sides — book a free discovery call and bring the job description. If the hire wins, we'll tell you so.
Aspendora Technologies provides co-managed IT and managed IT services to Houston-area businesses, since 2010.