Comparing a salary against a monthly fee misses most of the picture. Here is the fully loaded math on both sides, what each model genuinely cannot do, and the hybrid that usually wins the argument.
Published July 16, 2026 • Synergy Telecom & Medical Systems, Rome GA
The instinctive math is salary versus MSP invoice. But the hire comes with tooling, training, and coverage gaps to fund, and the MSP fee already includes a security stack and a bench. Compare delivered capability, not headline numbers.
Both models can be right. The point of this page is to show which one is right at your size and complexity, using published 2026 figures you can check.
A capable systems administrator in the Georgia market runs $70,000 to $110,000+ fully loaded once benefits and employer costs land.
Then comes the part budgets forget: the tooling one person needs (monitoring, endpoint protection, backup licensing, a ticketing system) adds hundreds to thousands per month, training keeps them current, and every vacation or resignation is a single point of failure with two weeks' notice. None of that makes hiring wrong; it makes the real number bigger than the offer letter.
Managed service agreements publish at $100 to $250+ per user per month in 2026. A 30-person company therefore spends roughly $3,000 to $7,500+ per month, or $36,000 to $90,000+ per year, with tooling, monitoring, and coverage included.
That is the same budget territory as one loaded hire, buying a team instead of a person. The trade is real, though: an MSP is not in your hallway, and it serves other clients. Our managed IT cost guide breaks down what should be inside that fee before you compare quotes.
Presence and context. An employee absorbs your business by osmosis, handles the printer emergency during the board meeting, and picks up the technology-adjacent tasks no contract anticipates.
For organizations with constant hands-on needs, daily line-of-business software babysitting, or a culture that wants IT in the room, that presence is worth paying for.
Depth and continuity. A team covers networking, security, and cloud at the same time, answers at 2am, and does not take PTO all at once.
The security economics are the quietest advantage: enterprise-grade tooling is priced for fleets, so an MSP spreads costs no 20-person company could justify alone. One good generalist simply cannot be five specialists, and attackers do not schedule around your admin's vacation.
Keep the person, add the depth. Co-managed IT pairs your internal staff with an MSP's monitoring, tooling, security stack, and escalation bench.
Your person stays the face of IT and owns local context; the outside team owns the infrastructure underneath and the after-hours pager. For growing companies attached to a good internal tech, this is usually the honest answer, and it is a standard engagement shape on our managed IT page.
Rules of thumb from the math above:
Compliance-heavy businesses, especially medical practices, should weight the security and documentation depth heavily; our provider-selection guide lists the questions that separate contenders from brochures.
At what size does in-house IT start making sense? As a rule of thumb, dedicated internal IT starts penciling out somewhere past 50 users with real complexity, and becomes clearly right past 100. Below that, the same budget generally buys more capability as a managed agreement.
Can we keep our current IT person and still use an MSP? Yes, that is co-managed IT, and it is often the strongest setup: your person keeps local context and the daily relationship while the outside team supplies tooling, security depth, and after-hours coverage.
Are the dollar figures here Synergy Telecom rates? They are published 2026 market figures for salaries and MSP pricing, included so you can audit the logic. Your actual numbers depend on headcount, systems, and compliance needs, which is what a free assessment establishes.
Is switching models disruptive? It does not need to be. A proper transition starts with documentation and runs both arrangements briefly in parallel, so monitoring and support continue without a gap while responsibility moves.
Want the math run on your actual headcount? Contact us and we will do it with you, no strings attached.
2026 published figures, fully loaded.
Related reading: Managed IT cost guide • Choosing a provider