Your IT person is stretched. Tickets queue up, projects stall, and they’re the only one who knows how half the systems work. The obvious answer is a second hire.
Sometimes that’s the right answer. Often it isn’t, because a second person adds capacity but not the things a stretched IT function is usually missing. Here is an honest way to compare the two.
What a second hire really costs
The salary is only the start. Using 2026/27 figures, here is a worked example for a support engineer on £40,000:
| Cost | Approximate annual figure |
|---|---|
| Salary | £40,000 |
| Employer National Insurance (15% above £5,000) | £5,250 |
| Employer pension (3% minimum, on qualifying earnings) | about £1,000 |
| Employment cost before anything else | about £46,250 |
Then add the costs that don’t appear on a payslip:
- Recruitment. Agency fees are usually a percentage of first-year salary. Even a direct hire takes partner time to shortlist and interview.
- Equipment and licences. A laptop, Microsoft 365, and admin tools for the role.
- Training and certification to keep their skills current.
- Time to become useful. A new hire takes months to learn your firm’s systems, people and quirks.
For context, advertised support engineer roles in Northern Ireland currently show medians of roughly £41,000–£45,000 (ITJobsWatch, 2026; based on small samples). Junior technician roles cost less, but bring less depth.
What the hire still won’t give you
This is the part that usually decides it. Two people in-house are still two generalists working office hours. A second hire doesn’t come with:
- Security monitoring out of hours. Attacks don’t wait for Monday. Someone, or something, has to be watching at 2am on a Sunday.
- The security tooling itself. Endpoint detection and response, device management, email protection and backup all have to be bought and run, whoever you employ.
- Specialist depth. Microsoft 365 security, incident response and compliance are specialisms. Few generalists have all of them.
- Cover. Holidays and sickness still leave you with one person, or none. A team of two is still fragile.
- An outside view. Nobody marks their own homework well. In-house teams rarely spot gaps in systems they built.
What co-managed IT gives you instead
Co-managed IT keeps your IT person at the centre and adds what they can’t provide alone:
- 24/7 monitoring and response, with the tools included.
- Specialist depth in security and Microsoft 365.
- Capacity for projects and busy periods.
- Cover when your person is away.
- A documented split of who does what, so nothing falls between the two.
The fee is predictable, and it covers people, tools and process together. That matters when you compare: a second salary still needs the tooling budget on top.
When hiring is the better answer
Co-managed IT isn’t always right. Hire when:
- The work is mostly hands-on and on-site. Desks, devices, rooms and people who need someone physically there every day.
- You run specialist in-house systems that need deep, daily attention from someone embedded in the firm.
- You’re large enough to need a team, and you’re building one deliberately.
- The gap really is capacity. If your monitoring, security tooling and specialist cover are already sorted, another pair of hands may be all you need.
Many firms end up doing both over time. Co-managed support first, a hire later when the volume justifies it, with the external partner still providing depth and cover.
How to make the decision
Before you write a job description, answer three questions:
- What is actually going undone? List it. Is it volume, or is it specialist and out-of-hours work?
- What would a second person cost in full? Employment cost plus the tools and cover they would still need.
- What breaks if your current IT person leaves? If the answer is “a lot”, the problem is concentration of knowledge, and a second generalist only partly solves it. We’ve covered that in What happens to your firm’s IT when a key person leaves.
If you want the provider pricing side in more detail, see our guide to managed IT services costs in the UK.
Related: Co-managed IT for professional firms
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