Most shops compare an in-house drafter's salary to an outsourced invoice and stop there. That comparison is wrong, because it ignores everything around the salary — and the throughput problem that headcount alone never solves.
- Salary is
- Roughly half the true in-house cost
- The hidden cost
- Idle capacity between bids, ramp time, turnover
- The real lever
- Throughput during bid season, not headcount
The spreadsheet most shops build
It usually looks like: drafter salary versus outsourced cost per project. On that math, in-house often looks cheaper — and for a shop with steady, predictable volume, it can be. But the spreadsheet is missing most of the real cost, and all of the risk.
The fully-loaded cost of a seat
A drafting seat is not a salary. It is salary plus payroll taxes, benefits, software licenses, a workstation, training, and management overhead — frequently pushing the true cost to roughly 1.5 to 2 times the base wage. Then add the months of ramp time before a new hire is productive in your library, and the cost of turnover when they leave with that knowledge.
The throughput problem
Here is what headcount cannot fix: demand is lumpy. Bid season and big awards create spikes no fixed staff can absorb without either turning work away or burning people out. The rest of the year, that same seat is underutilized — you pay for capacity you are not using. One drafter is one drafter, whether you have two projects or twelve.
When in-house wins
In-house genuinely wins when volume is high and steady, when the work is deeply proprietary, and when you have the management bandwidth to keep a drafter productive and current. A shop running consistent volume with a maintained library and a strong lead drafter has every reason to keep it in-house.
The hybrid most shops land on
The model that works for most growing shops is hybrid: a core in-house capability for everyday work, plus a reserved outsourced partner for overflow, bid season, and specialty work. You pay for surge capacity only when you use it, and you stop turning away bids because the drafting queue is full. That is exactly what our outsourced and retainer drafting is built for.