The in-house vs offshore roles call in 2026 comes down to one thing: which of your salary lines somebody else can reprice without your agreement. Wage growth across a fixed set of jobs ran at 3.2 per cent over the year to the June quarter. What actual people cost ran faster. The difference is the part of your payroll you never negotiated.
Most founders of a thirty-person business read wage headlines as weather, something happening to the economy rather than to them. Outstaffer has a stake in the answer and publishes what a seat costs, so read the arithmetic below sceptically. The numbers under it are the ABS's.
The shock absorbers sit in contracts your team never signed
Iain Ross AO, a member of the RBA's Monetary Policy Board, told the University of Melbourne on 22 September that there is no evidence of a wage-price spiral and that recent data make one unlikely. His reasoning is mechanical rather than optimistic, which is why an employer should read it.
Wage outcomes cannot propagate the way they did in the 1970s, he argued, because the plumbing changed. Enterprise agreements lodged in the year to March 2026 ran an average nominal term of three years, and employees covered by one cannot lawfully push for more during it. Only about a tenth of agreement-covered employees move onto a newly negotiated agreement in any quarter. Union membership is 13 per cent, and 7.9 per cent in the private sector.
Read that list back. Every item is friction that stops a wage claim being reopened, and none of it exists in your business. Your people sit on individual contracts with no expiry date, priced by whoever else is hiring this month.
The half a point that never reaches the index
The Wage Price Index rose 3.2 per cent over the year to the June quarter 2026. Average weekly ordinary time earnings for full-time adults rose 3.7 per cent in the year to May, to $2,083.70 a week. Both are ABS figures, and they disagree for the reason Ross spells out: the index tracks the price of a fixed set of jobs, while average earnings pick up people moving between jobs at different pay.
What does that gap cost on thirty people?
About $16,250 a year. One full-time adult on that ABS average earns $108,352 over a year. Index growth of 3.2 per cent adds roughly $3,467. Earnings growth of 3.7 per cent adds roughly $4,009. The half a percentage point between them, near enough $542 a head, is the price of movement, and across thirty people it lands at about $16,250 before a dollar of on-costs. That beats five seats of Employer of Record at our published $250 per employee per month, and unlike those seats it arrives without a quote.
Two of your thirty staff already work somewhere else as well, which is the same market from the other side. We itemised what a single head costs earlier this month.
Is 3.2 per cent worth the alarm?
No. Inflation is expected to reach the midpoint of the target range by early 2028, real wages have partly recovered, and the labour market has eased, with unemployment at 4.5 per cent in July against 4.2 per cent a year earlier. A wage bill growing at roughly the rate of the economy is an ordinary cost of trading, and your competitors are paying it too. The harder counter is that Manila and Ho Chi Minh City have tight labour markets as well. A good hire there gets counter-offered like a good hire in Surry Hills.
Related reading
- Two Numbers Decide Whether You Should Build Your Team Abroad
- The Reserve Bank Repriced Your Team On Wednesday
Which roles are you content to have priced by strangers
That is what the September speech leaves on your desk. Some roles should be repriced by the market, because that is where the scarce judgement sits and you want to keep paying for it. Others are repriced only because they sit in the most competitive city on the continent, and the work would not notice a change of postcode.
Sort the next twelve months of hiring into those two piles. Then run one role through and see what it prices at. Which of your roles is in the wrong pile, and for how long?
Outstaffer is not a law firm or an accounting practice. Get advice for your own circumstances before restructuring a role.
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