What are the hourly rates for PHP Developers in India

What are the hourly rates for PHP Developers in India

Outsourcing your PHP projects to India? It would definitely be a good idea because you have a lot of options ahead, both in terms of skilled talent availability and budget. Once you decide to outsource your software development projects, the number of talents that’s accessible to you increases several times fold. 

To outsource or not to

Once you have a project that needs to be scripted in PHP, you should have an excellent software developer to guide your team of developers. You can either outsource a single developer or a team of developers to conduct your project. 

Since PHP is one of the oldest general purpose scripting languages in the world, there are plenty of skilled people who are ready to go on board with you. PHP might be old, but it is still one of the trendiest programming languages in web development. You might already know that several of the most popular websites in the world using PHP are Facebook, WordPress, Tumblr, Spotify, Slack and a 200 million other websites. 

If you are looking at expert web development, you need to hire the best PHP developers, and you will get skilled developers in India. 

Why India for hiring PHP developers?

India has been an excellent destination for outsourcing projects because of a number of reasons. The primary reason would be the access to a huge talent pool. You get hardworking people who not only accept ideas of the clients, but have their own creative strategies to make these ideas work. India is practically a global IT hub, and there is an increased demand for talents, so if you are a developer looking for work, depending on your skills and talent, you are likely to get work.

If you are a company looking for entry level, intermediate or expert developers, your search ends here because it is possible to hire them all for reasonable rates. 

We can now go further into the rates of developers to know more.

Selecting the PHP developer

The amount you are ready to spend on a PHP developer depends on the skill level and expertise that you need. If you need the developer to have an all-encompassing and in-depth knowledge of PHP, you need to be ready to spend for the quality you get. They would have hands-on practical experience on Laravel, Symphony and other popular frameworks. 

They should have excellent understanding of Javascript concepts, and experience in working with Object-Oriented programming concepts. Knowledge of the working of control systems like SVG/Git is a great advantage while hiring PHP developers in India.

Developers usually have front-end skills in HTML and CSS, and knowledge of working on SQL/MySQL databases

Finding PHP developers in India

There are plenty of developers in India, but to find the right person for your task requires knowledge about what to look for. You can either go the old fashioned way of contracting with a recruiting agent and receive resumes of PHP developers. Or you can give out feelers in online communities like GitHub and Stack Overflow. There are recruiting agencies that function online too, like TimesJobs, Naukri, Monster, even freelance portals like Upwork and People Per Hour. 

The cost of hiring PHP developer

As mentioned earlier, the pay scale of the developers vary depending on their skill level and any additional skills that they possess. When you hire PHP developers, their skills in Javascript, MySQL, HTML and jQuery matter a lot. But if they have additional skills in the following, it would prove to be greatly advantageous:

• Drupal
• Magneto
• Symphony
• ASP
• Angular JS
• DHTML
• Ajax
• ColdFusion
• .NET

The cost for the developers will lessen while having freelance developers in your team. Full time developers working out of your office will take up a lot of resources like workspace bonuses, insurance and so on. This is probably the reason why many companies choose to hire freelance, because they come with no strings attached. 

Indian PHP developers are far less costly when compared to developers from the UK, USA and Canada. You can easily get developers at these rates:

• Basic back-end PHP developer – $20/hr
• Middle-level PHP developer – $30-40/hr
• Full stack PHP developer – $50-$90/hr

Basic back-end PHP developers – They are junior developers who are aware of backend fundamentals like RESTful APIs and Lambda functions. They will be experts in Databases like MySQL and Content Management systems like WordPress. They will work with technology stack like LAMP

Middle-level PHP developers – They are developers with skills in one more PHP frameworks, and have more than fundamental knowledge of backend servers like Amazon Web Services. They are middle-level developers on the way to becoming advanced level developers. 

Full-stack developers – They are expert developers who have both frontend and backend expertise. They can easily work with ReactPHP, Twig and Blade. 

It is also important to discuss the payment structure before getting into contract with the developers. You can either choose the milestone model or the project completion model. Paying the developers once milestones are crossed during the stipulated time frame is a good idea. This way, you can keep track of the project progress, suggest revisions, make changes and so on. All these details must be discussed specifically while drawing the contract. 

The payment for the PHP developer is dependent on a number of factors like the length and complexity of the project, the technological adeptness of the developer, the education qualifications they have, any specific training you have to give them once you hire them and so on. So there is no one size fits all scenario. The rate would also vary when you hire from different cities in India. Developers from Tier 1 cities, namely Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Pune and Kolkata charge much more than developers from Tier 2 cities. 

If you are on a budget, but need experts who are willing to learn and adapt, you can hire from Tier 2 cities. Those include Kochi, Indore, Jaipur, Vishakhapatnam, Shimla, Surat and 95 other cities. 

Conclusion

Once you have set your budget, your vendor would give you access to the developers so you can interview them and test their technical prowess. You can have open discussions with the developers to test their skill levels and to know whether they really understand the project, and be able to deliver. 

It is important to communicate well with the vendor because only then will they be able to deliver correctly. If you are looking to finish a complex project with a team of junior developers, you will have to redo the project again. And spend more time and money on it. You can interview the developers personally to know whether they have actually grasped the project before finalising the contract. Insist on transparency from your side, so you can insist on integrity, honesty and transparency from their side as well. 

Interesting Links:

What will be the average salary of a PHP Developer?

Want to explore the career path of a PHP Developer?

Pictures: Canva

The author: Sascha Thattil works at Software-Developer-India.com which is a part of the YUHIRO Group. YUHIRO is a German-Indian enterprise which provides programmers to IT companies, agencies and IT departments.