In-House IT vs Managed IT: The Real Cost Comparison Guide

The real monthly cost of one IT hire is never the number on the offer letter. On top of it sits the mandatory employer social security contribution, hardware, software licenses, and the question of who covers the desk when that person is on leave. Most SMEs comparing in-house IT to a managed IT contract only look at the salary line and skip the rest. That’s how the decision ends up on the wrong side.

What an in-house IT hire actually costs

IT support salaries in Türkiye vary by role and city, but 2026 market data from local job platforms puts a general support role around 34,600 TL/month, a technical support specialist around 41,100 TL, and a dedicated IT support specialist around 48,400 TL. Treat these as a band, not a fixed number.

The gap opens after that line. Türkiye’s 2026 employer-side social security contribution runs roughly 22.75% on top of gross salary (retirement 11%, health insurance 7.5%, minimum occupational accident insurance 2.25%, unemployment insurance 2%) — a mandatory cost most SMEs forget to add when they compare options. A 48,400 TL IT support specialist actually costs the business close to 59,400 TL/month once that contribution is added. Add laptop depreciation, remote-monitoring tool licenses and an annual training budget, and the real number climbs further.

Line item	Monthly impact (approx.)
Gross salary (market band)	35,000–50,000 TL
Employer social security contribution (~22.75%)	+8,000–11,500 TL
Hardware + tooling depreciation	+1,500–3,000 TL
Training/certification budget	+500–1,500 TL

That table covers a single hire. It says nothing about what happens when that one person takes annual leave, gets sick, or resigns — the gap usually gets absorbed by the owner or a team lead scrambling to cover the desk.

What a managed IT contract’s flat fee actually buys

Managed IT (MSP) pricing in the Turkish market typically runs 800–2,000 TL per user per month; the spread reflects scope — business-hours remote support at the low end versus EDR, backup verification and tight SLAs at the high end. That fee usually covers: ticket handling (remote and on-site), network and server monitoring, patch management, baseline security monitoring, and monthly reporting.

What it usually doesn’t cover: new hardware purchases, large infrastructure projects (server migration, office moves), or software license fees (Microsoft 365, security tools are billed separately). The flat fee covers operations, not capital spend.

Two models, side by side: a 15-person office

Numbers stay abstract until you put a real office against them. Take a 15-user, single-location company.

Model	Monthly cost	Coverage
In-house (1 IT support specialist)	~59,400 TL + hardware/training	Business hours, single point of failure, gaps during leave/illness
Managed IT (1,200 TL/user)	18,000 TL	Remote support, monitoring, baseline security, no coverage-gap risk

At this size, in-house comes out to roughly three times the cost of a managed contract — and it’s the more fragile model of the two, since it depends on one person. But the math isn’t fixed: managed IT’s per-user fee scales linearly with headcount, while an in-house salary stays flat. In our field experience, the two models start converging somewhere around 60-80 users.

Which model fits which size

• Under 30 users: Managed IT alone is usually cheaper and broader in scope. There isn’t enough day-to-day volume to justify a full-time hire.
• 30-80 users: A hybrid setup is the most common pattern — one in-house person handling daily user requests, backed by a managed provider running monitoring, security and backups.
• Over 80 users: In-house teams typically grow to 2-3 people, while the managed provider shifts toward specialized layers (security monitoring, network engineering, disaster recovery). Very few businesses at this scale run purely on one model.

The hybrid model is what we actually see in the field

The clean “in-house or managed” split looks tidy on paper; in practice it’s rare. What we see across most Turkish SMEs: one in-house person handles hardware rollouts, printer issues, and new-user setup day to day, backed by a managed IT contract running 24/7 monitoring, security incident response, and backup verification in the background. When that one in-house person is on leave, the desk isn’t unattended — monitoring keeps running from outside.

The question worth asking isn’t “which is cheaper.” It’s “in which model does one person’s absence not stop the business.”

Frequently Asked Questions

Does managed IT completely replace an in-house hire? Usually not. In small offices it can substitute for one entirely, but at mid-size it typically works as a complementary layer alongside an in-house person.

At what headcount does in-house become cheaper? There’s no fixed threshold. In our field observation, the two models start converging around 60-80 users, but it depends heavily on industry, shift patterns and hardware complexity.

Besides the social security contribution, what’s the hidden cost of in-house IT? Continuity is the biggest one. When the one person is on leave, sick, or leaves the company, support quality drops for the weeks it takes to transition — a risk a managed IT contract spreads across its own team instead.

Does a hybrid model create overlapping responsibilities? It can, if the split isn’t written down. Define upfront who responds first to which type of incident, and who escalation goes to.