SDR cost calculator: in-house against outsourced
Updated August 2026 // by Mark Glazer, ReplyLead
The short answer: a US SDR at $80,000 on-target costs roughly $100,000 fully loaded in year one once employer costs are added, plus about $34,000 a year in sending infrastructure that does not disappear when you hire. The calculator below lets you replace every one of those numbers with your own and shows the arithmetic rather than a verdict.
Your numbers
The arithmetic, in full.
In-house year one = OTE + employer cost + infrastructure =
$80,000 + $20,000 + $34,092 = $134,092.
Ramp cost = OTE and employer cost for the unproductive months =
($100,000 / 12) x 3 = $25,000.
Qualified leads = volume x 12 / 4,100 =
50,000 x 12 / 4,100 = 146.
Cost per qualified lead = year-one cost / qualified leads =
$134,092 / 146 = $916.
What the defaults are, and which of them are measured
Most cost comparisons in this category quote a single fully-loaded figure and never show the assumption underneath it. These are the four that move the answer most, and each is labelled by what kind of number it is.
| Input | Default | Kind | Where it comes from |
|---|---|---|---|
| SDR on-target earnings | $80,000 | Measured | Bridge Group 2025 US median, cited across this site |
| Infrastructure at 50,000 emails | $2,841/month | Measured | ReplyLead published tier, see pricing |
| Emails per sales-qualified lead | 4,100 | Measured | 1,080,000 emails produced 263 SQLs in one portal-tracked 12-month programme |
| Employer cost on top of OTE | 25% | Judgement | Payroll tax, benefits and equipment vary by country and company |
| Ramp before first meetings | 3 months | Judgement | Directional, not measured by us; adjust it to your own hiring experience |
The number this calculator cannot give you
It returns cost per qualified lead, not cost per closed deal, and the gap between those two is your close rate, which we cannot observe. It also uses a single conversion constant of one qualified lead per 4,100 emails, taken from one programme in one category.
That constant is the weakest assumption on this page, and the honest reason is in our own measured data: across 73 campaigns and 248,443 emails, reply rate per contacted lead ranged from 0.56% to 7.83%, a fourteenfold spread under one operator and one methodology, across 372 separate client sending domains. A calculator that hides that spread behind one average is selling certainty it does not have. Use the output as an order of magnitude and read the distribution on cold email benchmarks.
What the calculator deliberately leaves out
- Management time. An SDR needs coaching, pipeline review and someone to escalate to. That cost is real and we do not model it because it varies too much to guess.
- Attrition. SDR tenure is short, and a replacement restarts the ramp clock. Model it by running the calculator twice if you expect turnover inside a year.
- Deal value. Nothing here knows your ACV. A $917 cost per qualified lead is cheap at a $40,000 contract and ruinous at $2,000.
- Agency fees. The second output is infrastructure only, deliberately, so you can add whatever commercial model you are being quoted and compare like for like. Ours is on pricing.
How to read the result
If the ramp cost alone is larger than a year of infrastructure, the build case is resting on a hire producing from day one, which the ramp slider exists to test. If cost per qualified lead is within a few percent either way, the decision is not financial and should be made on control, speed and who carries the risk. Those are priced in full on alternatives to hiring an SDR, and the scope of what an agency actually takes on is on done-for-you outbound.
Common questions
What does an in-house SDR really cost per year?
At $80,000 on-target plus 25% employer cost and $2,841 a month in sending infrastructure, about $134,000 in year one. Three months of ramp accounts for roughly $25,000 of that before a single meeting is booked.
How many qualified leads should 50,000 emails a month produce?
About 146 a year on our measured constant of one per 4,100 emails. That figure comes from a single 12-month programme and campaign-level results vary by more than 14 times, so treat it as an order of magnitude.
Does this include the agency fee?
No, deliberately. The outsourced figure here is infrastructure only, so you can add whatever commercial model you are quoted and compare like for like.
Why is cost per closed deal not shown?
Because it depends on your close rate, which we cannot observe. Multiply the cost per qualified lead by your own qualified-to-closed ratio.
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