What an SDR actually costs in 2026

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

We checked. On 4 August 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 is the sole vendor publishing an explicit price by SDR capability and location. It is the fairest external anchor available:

Add $2,499/mo for team and platform. All-in offshore: $4,000–$6,000/mo. All-in US: $7,000–$9,000/mo.

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.

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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.

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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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Work out your own number

Our 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.

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