What an SDR actually costs in 2026

Most of this industry will not tell you what it charges.

We checked. In 2026, Belkins, Martal Group, Operatix, SalesHive and Leadium all decline to publish a price. Belkins lists tiers by appointment volume with no figures. Martal lists three tiers, each saying "Inquire about pricing."

That is why almost every number you'll find for those firms is secondhand, and why the secondhand numbers disagree so violently. Reported figures for Belkins alone span $3,000 to $14,800 a month depending on which listicle you land on.

So here is what is actually published, what it actually costs to hire in-house, and, the part nobody puts in writing, where each of these firms' reps actually sit.

Every figure below carries its source and its date. Where we could only establish something secondhand, we say so rather than presenting an estimate as a price.

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1. What the agencies actually publish

One normalisation note, because it trips people up. SalesRoads quotes per four weeks — thirteen billing cycles a year, not twelve. Belkins' own comparison table repeats it as "$9,500/month". A competitor getting a competitor's price wrong is a decent illustration of why we cite primary sources only.

The only public price ladder in the category

CIENCE publishes the category's only public price ladder, by SDR capability and location. Read it carefully, because it is not what it looks like:

Those figures are not a service price. They are the rep's salary. CIENCE states it plainly: "100% pass-through pricing, you pay SDRs directly at cost." Their own commission formula computes off "base salary × percent of target hit × 0.7", which confirms the ladder is base pay.

What a client actually pays on top of that US Level 2 rep at $5,500:

So the honest comparable is roughly $8,000/month before any commission, and around $11,850/month at full quota, plus per-meeting fees and $6,000 of one-time setup. And the client directs the rep: CIENCE's own page says "You choose, onboard, and direct SDRs" and "SDRs report into your team day to day."

Worth knowing if you are shopping this ladder: the US column rose by $1,000 at every level in the seven months to August 2026. Offshore did not move.

Note what this ladder actually says: capability and location are two different axes. A scripted outreach rep and an independent producer are different jobs, priced differently, before you have said a word about geography. That distinction matters more than most buyers realise, and we come back to it below.

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2. What a US in-house SDR actually costs

This is where most build-vs-buy comparisons quietly cheat, in both directions. Agencies inflate the in-house number because it sells outsourcing. Buyers deflate it because they only count salary.

Here is the build-up from primary sources only.

Cash compensation. The Bridge Group 2025 SDR Metrics Report (n=351 B2B companies) puts it at $55K base / $80K OTE, a 68:32 split. RepVue, from 8,462 verified salaries, independently reports $60K base / $85K OTE.

Ignore the Glassdoor figure. Its $103,516 "median total pay" is an outlier. Its own base band ($55–72K) agrees with everyone else, the gap is model-estimated "additional pay" of $30–57K, which is implausible for a 68:32 role. Salary.com contradicts itself across three separate URLs ($38,992 / $63,193 / $70,434).

Employer load. FICA at 7.65% ¹, FUTA at an effective $42/employee/year ², employer-share health insurance at $7,885/year ³, retirement at 4.7% average. Cross-check: BLS ECEC puts private-industry benefits at 30.1% of total compensation.

Tooling. A lean stack is about $3,830/seat/year. Apollo Professional $948, LinkedIn Sales Navigator Advanced $1,800, HubSpot Sales Pro $1,080. A real outbound stack with intent data and a dialer runs $12,000–$15,000/seat/year. (ZoomInfo, Orum, Nooks and ConnectAndSell all publish nothing.)

Fully loaded: $104,000–$122,000 a year. Before management overhead. Before commission variance.

The three numbers a salary comparison leaves out

From the same Bridge Group study:

• Ramp to full productivity: 3.0 months. Their lowest since 2010, and still a quarter of the year.
• Annual attrition: 40% median (IQR 21–57%). Average tenure 1.9 years.
• Only 60% of SDRs hit quota, described as the lowest on record. RepVue independently reports 57.1%.

Put together: you get roughly nine productive months per rep-year, with a four-in-ten chance of repeating recruiting and ramp inside twelve months, and a four-in-ten chance the rep never hits target at all.

That risk currently sits with you. Under an agency, it sits with the agency.

Run this on your own numbers. Put your salary band and your meeting target into the US SDR cost calculator and it builds the figure above from the same primary sources, with ramp and attrition included or excluded as you prefer. Free, no signup.

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3. Where the reps actually sit, and who tells you

This is the part that isn't in anyone's pricing table, and for a regulated buyer it is the part that decides procurement.

Belkins. Their SDR page states: "We hire globally and choose the best SDRs from the U.S., UK, Europe, and other English-speaking countries." Their own live careers board, on the day we checked, carried zero US or UK SDR openings. The single SDR requisition covered Remote-EMEA plus Croatia, Czechia, Georgia, Kosovo, Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia and Ukraine. They also state that their SDRs "introduce themselves as part of your organization, not as third-party vendors," using lookalike email domains.

Martal Group. The homepage claims "200+ onshore sales executives" and a split of US 60% / Canada 20% / EU 10% / LATAM 10%. We could not independently verify that split. What is verifiable: in May 2026 they ran two SDR requisitions concurrently, one remote US/Canada, and one requiring candidates to reside in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Brazil, Uruguay or Bolivia with a Cambridge C1 or IELTS 7.0+ certificate. South America is a reasonable place to staff. Calling it "onshore" is a stretch.

SalesHive is the most transparent firm in the set, and deserves credit for it: their application form is gated to US states, their pricing page carries a literal US-based / offshore toggle, and the offshore option is named as the Philippines at "40–60% less".

CIENCE's "offshore" is now a price band rather than a place, the assets moved to graph8 and reps are sourced through a marketplace, so delivery geography is no longer stable.

Why this is a procurement question, not a preference

If you sell to banks or credit unions, your prospects' vendor-risk teams work under OCC Bulletin 2002-16, which governs bank use of foreign-based third-party providers, and FFIEC's outsourcing guidance, which flags undisclosed offshore subcontracting as a specific supervisory concern.

Offshore is not the problem. Bank of America and Wells Fargo both run support from the Philippines. Undisclosed offshore is the problem.

Which is why we publish ours.

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4. Stop comparing dials. Compare meetings.

If a vendor leads with dials per day, check it against the benchmark. Bridge Group's 2025 median is 44–46 dials per day; top quartile is 67. Anything near 200 is only reachable with a parallel dialer, where a "dial" is not a human attempt.

The number that survives scrutiny is cost per meeting booked.

At the benchmark of 12–15 meetings per SDR per month:

A healthy mid-market band is $150–$600 per meeting.

The CIENCE line above is its rep-plus-team-plus-platform cost before commission, per-meeting fees or the $6,000 of one-time setup. At full quota it is nearer $11,850/month. Ours is the whole thing: no commission to fund, no per-meeting fee, no setup charge.

On our own pricing. A dedicated full-time SDR runs $3,500–$5,500/month depending on the market they sell into. The table above uses our US rate of $5,500, because everything it is compared against is US cost. Quoting our lowest regional rate against a US in-house hire would be exactly the apples-to-oranges move this article exists to call out.

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5. So what should you actually do?

If you have a simple ICP, a long list and time to train, hire in-house. Budget $104–122K fully loaded, three months of ramp, and a 40% chance of doing it again next year.

If you need meetings this quarter and want the ramp-and-attrition risk off your balance sheet, outsource. But get three things in writing before you sign: where the rep sits, cost per meeting rather than per dial, and what happens if the rep doesn't work out.

And separate capability from geography. CIENCE's ladder proves the point: a scripted outreach rep and an independent producer who can run discovery are different jobs at different prices, in any country. If a vendor's only lever is a cheaper country, ask what changed about the work.

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6. What this looks like when it runs

Benchmarks are worth having. They are not the same as delivery. So here is ours, in our clients' words and numbers rather than our adjectives:

"We booked 100+ demos a month consistently. Division50's SDR and outreach system helped us convert competitors' clients and break into new markets."

— Shaya Alqahtani, Sales Manager, Zid Ecommerce

"We worked with Division50 on a government-backed trade mission. They handled outreach and paid ads, end to end. Over 1,700 leads, 200+ B2B meetings, and a cost per lead under $0.20."

— Rahul Jain, Director, Research & Advisory, Wise Consulting

"We achieved over 3,500 registrations with a 40%+ attendance rate and closed over $20M in just 10 days. Division50 handled everything from lead targeting and generation to confirmations."

— Candice Van Rensburg, Regional General Manager, Boost

Two more on the record: ARN, the radio network behind Virgin Radio, filled a large-scale B2B event on 5,000+ qualified leads at a 30% attendance rate and closed $13.6M+. Roxy Cinemas ran their first-ever B2B event with under two months to prepare, took 1,000+ qualified leads to a 30% attendance rate, and closed over $10M across three days.

These are real engagements with named people at named companies. Read them in full on our success stories.

And they are not all in one market. In Canada, we ran Corus Entertainment's 2025 live event series across five cities — Winnipeg, Calgary, Vancouver, Toronto and Edmonton. We worked roughly 91,000 records by phone and SMS and delivered 957 registrations against a 950 target, with Winnipeg and Edmonton finishing more than 20% above their city targets. In Australia, we've run Australian Community Media's regional campaigns three years running, through Tamworth, Dubbo, Wagga, Newcastle and Canberra. In South Africa, we filled Primedia's Prime Impact event across Johannesburg and Cape Town. In the UK, ITV. And for Truein we run a live multi-channel outbound engine — calling, email and LinkedIn — into both Mexico and the United States, targeting HR and operations decision-makers at enterprise manufacturers, industrial automation firms and facilities groups.

That range is the reason we can quote one price for a US-market SDR and a lower one elsewhere without hand-waving: we have run both, and we know what each actually costs to staff.

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Work out your own number

Our US SDR cost calculator runs the in-house build-up above against the outsourced comparables, fully loaded, with ramp and attrition included rather than assumed away. Free, no signup, and it takes about a minute.

Hiring outside the US? We built the same thing on each market's own statute rather than translating the American one, because the employer load is not the same charge at a different rate — it is a different charge. The UK calculator runs HMRC's 2026/27 employer National Insurance and the auto-enrolment pension band. The UAE calculator has no payroll tax in it at all, because there isn't one on expatriate staff — the cost is gratuity accrual, mandatory medical cover and the visa cycle. The Saudi calculator carries a toggle for nationality, because a flat expatriate levy and proportional GOSI cross at about SAR 145,000 — below which a Saudi national is the cheaper hire, which is the opposite of what most people assume. Or see all four side by side.

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Methodology. Every figure is sourced and dated. Vendor prices were read from vendors' own pricing pages, or their own blogs where the pricing page publishes nothing, and are labelled accordingly. Delivery locations were established from live careers boards and companies' own FAQs, not from marketing copy. Employment costs use IRS, KFF and BLS primary data. Where sources disagree, we show the disagreement rather than averaging it away. Where we could not establish something, we say so.

Verified 2026. Agency pricing moves; we re-verify quarterly. If you find a figure that has changed, tell us and we'll correct it.