In-House IT vs Outsourced IT: The Real Cost for a 20-50 Person Business

If you’re a 20–50 person business trying to decide whether to hire an IT manager or move to a managed IT service, the honest answer is: it depends on what you’re actually trying to buy. A single internal hire and a managed IT service aren’t the same product at different prices. They cover different things, and the gap between them is exactly where most businesses in this bracket get caught out.

This guide models the true, fully-loaded cost of a Brisbane IT manager, not just the salary, against what an equivalent managed IT service costs at the same headcount, and is honest about where each option genuinely wins.

The quick answer

• One Brisbane IT manager, fully loaded (salary, super, recruitment, cover, tooling): roughly $150,000–$190,000 a year, for one person, with no redundancy if they’re sick, on leave, or leave the business.
• A managed IT service for a 30-person business: roughly $40,000–$63,000 a year (based on $110–$175 per user, per month covering a full team rather than one generalist.
• The real difference isn’t just price. It’s coverage: a managed service gives you specialist depth (security, network, cloud) and greater coverage and redundancy than one internal hire can provide.
• The honest exception: businesses at the upper end of this range, or with genuinely unique internal systems, are often better served by a hybrid — one internal generalist plus a managed provider filling the gaps — rather than an all-or-nothing choice. 

What one IT manager actually costs in Brisbane

Job boards quote a base salary. That’s the number everyone anchors on, and it’s the least useful figure in the whole decision, because it’s roughly half the real cost.

Brisbane IT manager salaries currently sit in the $110,000–$140,000 base range, depending on experience. Layer in everything that comes with actually employing someone, and the true cost looks like this:

That figure isn’t a scare number. It’s simply what employing anyone at this level actually costs once you stop looking only at the advertised salary. It’s also the number that should be sitting next to any managed IT quote before you compare the two.

What that same money buys with a managed IT service

Based on $99 to $199 per user per month, with most 15–100 user businesses landing between $110 and $175, here’s what a managed service costs across the range this article is about:

Even at 50 users, most businesses land at or below the fully loaded cost of a single IT manager, and for that money they get a team, not a generalist: a Service Desk, security specialists, network expertise, and vendor management, delivered under an SLA rather than dependent on one person’s calendar.

The coverage gap a single hire creates

This is the part a salary comparison alone misses entirely. Even a genuinely excellent IT manager is still one person, which means:

• No coverage during leave. Four weeks of annual leave plus sick days means real weeks each year where your only IT resource isn’t available, unless you’ve separately budgeted for cover.
• No specialist depth. A good generalist can competently run day-to-day operations, but security, network architecture, and cloud infrastructure are each genuinely specialist fields. One person is rarely deep in all three.
• Limited coverage outside business hours. If something breaks at 9pm or over a weekend, there may be no dedicated IT resource available to respond without an additional arrangement.
• A single point of failure. If they resign, you’re not just short-staffed; you’ve lost the institutional knowledge of how your entire environment is configured, often undocumented, while running a recruitment process that typically takes six to eight weeks.
• A career ceiling problem. Good IT managers often want to grow into architecture, security or leadership work. A role that’s 80% helpdesk can be genuinely hard to retain someone in, which recreates the recruitment cost on a cycle.

None of this means the person you’d hire is the problem — it means one person, by definition, can’t structurally provide what a team can.

When hiring internally is genuinely the right call

It would be dishonest to present this as a one-directional argument, so here’s where an internal hire is often the better decision:

• You have deeply bespoke, undocumented systems that need someone embedded full-time to understand — highly customised line-of-business software, industrial control systems, or a legacy environment that would take any external provider significant time to learn properly.
• You need a genuine physical presence, for example a manufacturing floor or a site with hardware that needs hands-on attention most days, where remote-first support isn’t the right operating model.
• You’re already well past 100 users and considering a small internal team (not just one person) — at that scale, the economics and the redundancy problem both look different.
• Culture and control matter enough to you that having IT fully embedded in the business, attending every meeting and fully immersed in day-to-day operations, outweighs the cost and coverage trade-offs above.

If any of these genuinely describe your business, an internal hire — or a small internal team — can be the right structural decision, cost aside.

The honest hybrid answer: co-managed IT

For a lot of businesses in the 20–50 user range, the real answer isn’t “hire” or “outsource” — it’s both, with the split depending on what you actually need covered. This is usually called co-managed IT: you keep an internal generalist who understands your business day-to-day, and a managed provider fills the gaps that one person structurally can’t cover — specialist security work, specialist technical skills, project delivery, escalation support, and leave cover.

This is already how TechPath supports businesses with an existing internal IT resource — providing overflow support, specialist technical skills, leave coverage, and an escalation point for issues beyond what one internal person should reasonably be expected to solve alone. It turns the internal hire from a single point of failure into a well-supported role, without the false choice of replacing them entirely.

We cover exactly how this split of responsibilities works — including where the line sits on helpdesk, cyber security, and coverage outside business hours — in a dedicated guide to co-managed IT.

How to actually decide

Before you commit to either path, it’s worth being specific about:

• What genuinely needs to be covered — helpdesk volume, security posture, projects, after-hours risk — rather than “IT” as one undifferentiated need
• Whether your environment has enough unique, undocumented complexity that embedding someone full-time is genuinely necessary
• What leave and turnover cover would cost if you hired internally, not just the salary
• Whether a hybrid, co-managed structure would let you keep what an internal hire gives you while covering what it doesn’t 

Where TechPath fits

TechPath works with businesses across this entire spectrum — as a fully outsourced IT department for businesses without an internal resource, and as a strategic partner working alongside an existing internal IT manager or team, providing overflow support, specialist technical skills, and leave coverage where it’s needed. A conversation with our team is the fastest way to understand what each path would actually cost for your specific business. Talk to Your Local IT Experts →

Frequently asked questions

Is it cheaper to hire an IT manager or use managed IT services? For most businesses under 50 users, a managed IT service is cheaper once the fully-loaded cost of an internal hire — salary, super, recruitment, leave cover and tooling — is properly accounted for, and it also removes the single-point-of-failure risk of one person.

How much does an IT manager cost in Brisbane, all-in? Base salary typically runs $110,000–$140,000, but the fully loaded cost — including superannuation, recruitment, leave cover and tooling — is closer to $150,000–$190,000 a year for one person.

Can I have both an internal IT person and a managed IT provider? Yes — this is usually called co-managed IT, and it’s a common structure for growing businesses that want to keep an internal generalist while an external provider covers specialist security, technical expertise and overflow work.

At what headcount does hiring internally start to make more sense? There’s no fixed number, but the economics generally shift once a business is large enough to justify a small internal team rather than a single hire, or has genuinely unique systems that need full-time, embedded knowledge.