What a WordPress developer really costs in 2026

The visible costs

Start with what lands in your accounts in the first year of employing a WordPress developer in the UK:

• Salary: £35,000. The median advertised salary for a WordPress developer in the six months to 11 September 2026, according to IT Jobs Watch. Someone experienced enough to look after a business site without supervision sits nearer the top of the range, at around £45,000.
• Employer National Insurance and pension: about £5,400. Employer NI is 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year, and auto-enrolment adds a minimum 3% employer pension contribution on most of the salary.
• Recruitment fee: £5,250. Good developers rarely answer job adverts. They get found, and a recruitment agency typically charges 15 to 20% of the first year’s salary.
• Equipment and setup: £1,500. A laptop, screens and the software they need to get started.

Year-one total: just over £47,000. And that is before the website itself. Hosting, backups, security and the premium plugins the site runs on are still yours to pay for.

The costs that do not show up on a payslip

Holiday. 25 days plus bank holidays is 33 of roughly 260 working days. You pay for twelve months and get about ten and a half of them.

Sick days. They arrive unplanned, and usually at the worst possible moment.

Management. Someone has to set the priorities, check the work and handle the HR. In most small businesses that someone is the owner, so the hire costs you your own time too.

The slow first months. Even a good developer needs time to learn how your site is built, which plugins it depends on and how your business works. You pay the full rate from day one.

Keeping them busy. This is the one that catches most businesses out. A typical business website needs a handful of changes a month, not five days a week of them. A full-time developer with nothing urgent to do either drifts onto other jobs or gets bored and leaves.

The single point of failure

One developer is one point of failure. When they are on holiday, nothing on the site changes. When they are ill, a broken checkout waits for them to get better. And when they leave, everything they knew about how your site fits together leaves with them, and you pay the recruitment fee and the slow first months all over again.

When hiring is the right call

If your website genuinely needs someone full time, because the site is the business or it changes every day and a team depends on it, hire. That is the right shape for you.

Most businesses are not that shape. They need the site kept fast, secure and up to date, and they need changes made properly when they come up. What they buy when they hire is a person. What they needed was the work done.

The alternative

This is the sum Wrev is built on. Every plan includes managed hosting, WordPress and plugin updates, security, backups and monitoring, with our own developers making the changes. The plans differ in how development is covered:

• Core, £149 a month. Each change gets a fixed price, and you approve it before any work starts.
• Pro, £299 a month. An hour of development every month, plus a staging copy of your site and daily backups.
• Unlimited, £599 a month. As many requests as you need, worked through one at a time, with no quotes.

Even Unlimited comes to £7,188 a year before VAT. That is less than a fifth of what a hire costs in the first year, and it includes the hosting. There is no recruitment fee, no holiday cover to arrange and no notice period.

It is not the same as a person at a desk five days a week. Requests are worked through one at a time, in the order you choose. For most business websites, that is plenty. See the plans in full.

If you are doing this sum for your own business, book a demo and bring your numbers.