A second systems administrator in Houston costs roughly $145,045 a year once you load the median wage. Co-managed IT for 75 users at $100 per user runs $90,000. The hire only becomes the cheaper line item somewhere near 121 users. Below that, you are paying more for 1 skill band than a partner charges for 6 of them.
For a 75-person Texas company, co-managed IT costs about $55,000 less per year than a second systems administrator, and the hire only wins on price once you pass roughly 121 users. That crossover is the decision.
Most comparisons on this topic ask whether you should fire your IT department. That is not your question. You have 1 person. They are good. They are also the only one who knows where anything is, and they took 4 days off in March and you felt all 4 of them. So the question is narrower. Do you add a second seat, or do you add co-managed IT underneath the seat you already have?
Those 2 options are not the same shape. One buys you a person. The other buys a bench. They cost different amounts, they fail in different ways, and the arithmetic that separates them is not the arithmetic in most cost comparisons, because most cost comparisons are still modeling a full replacement.
This is augmentation math instead. Every wage figure below comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the Houston metro, loaded with the current federal benefits multiplier, and every rate comes from what Texas companies are actually quoted.
What co-managed IT and a second hire each actually buy
Co-managed IT is a contract layer that sits under an internal IT team and supplies the tooling, after-hours coverage, and specialist skills that team does not have. Your person keeps the environment, the vendor relationships, and the institutional memory. The partner absorbs the queue, the monitoring, and the disciplines nobody on staff owns.
A second hire is different. It buys 40 more hours a week of 1 person’s particular skill set, plus that person’s judgment, plus a second set of hands during business hours on the days both of them are actually in the building. That is genuinely valuable. It is also 1 skill band, priced at the market rate for that band, whether or not you need 40 hours of it.
We have written the model overview before, and if you want the 3-way version that includes fully outsourced IT, that lives in our guide to choosing between in-house, managed, and co-managed IT. This piece stays on the 2-option version, because at 75 people with 1 IT lead in place, the 3-way framing hides the number that matters.
What a second sysadmin costs in Texas once you load it
Start with the wage, then stop pretending the wage is the cost.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2025 wage data for the Houston metro puts network and computer systems administrators at a median of $101,430 and a mean of $108,200. Statewide the median is $101,240, so Houston is not an outlier inside Texas. The national median for the occupation is $99,130, which means you are paying a small Texas premium and no more.
Now load it. The BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation series put total private-industry compensation at $46.60 per hour worked in the first quarter of 2026, of which $32.60 was wages and salaries. Divide the 2 and you get a load factor of 1.43. That covers payroll taxes, insurance, retirement, and paid leave. It does not cover a laptop, a desk, tooling seats, or a recruiter fee.
| Wage band, Houston sysadmin | Base wage | Loaded at 1.43x |
|---|---|---|
| 25th percentile | $81,800 | $116,974 |
| Median | $101,430 | $145,045 |
| Mean | $108,200 | $154,726 |
| 75th percentile | $131,090 | $187,459 |
Use $145,045 as your planning number. You can hire at the 25th percentile for $116,974 loaded, and plenty of companies do, but a 25th-percentile sysadmin is usually a first sysadmin rather than a second one, and the gap up to the Houston 75th percentile of $131,090 is exactly the depth you are short of. The second hire is supposed to raise your ceiling. Hiring below your existing person raises your headcount and nothing else.
What co-managed IT costs at 75 users
Texas co-managed pricing runs $60 to $130 per user per month, and companies with 1 internal IT lead cluster between $85 and $110. Our own co-managed plan starts at $100 per user. The full breakdown of what sits inside that number, including the split between the platform line and the labor line, is in our guide to co-managed IT cost in Texas.
At 75 users the annual math is short.
| Per-user rate | 75 users, monthly | 75 users, annual |
|---|---|---|
| $85 | $6,375 | $76,500 |
| $100 | $7,500 | $90,000 |
| $110 | $8,250 | $99,000 |
| $130 | $9,750 | $117,000 |
Even the top of the range lands under the loaded median for 1 hire. That is the first uncomfortable result, and it holds across every rate in the band.
The 75-person comparison, side by side
Here is the same year, priced 2 ways, at the midpoint of each.
| Line | Second sysadmin | Co-managed at $100 per user |
|---|---|---|
| Annual cost | $145,045 | $90,000 |
| Skill bands covered | 1 | 6 |
| Hours of the year covered | 2,080 shared with your existing hire | 8,760 |
| Tooling included | None, budgeted separately | Monitoring, endpoint, patching, backup |
| Time to productive | 39 days to fill, plus ramp | 2 to 6 weeks of onboarding |
| Coverage when your person is out | Partial | Full |
| Institutional knowledge | Grows in-house | Documented, but external |
The gap is $55,045. That is not rounding error. It is most of a junior help desk salary, and it is the number that usually ends the conversation on the spot.
An honest caveat before you take that to your CFO. Co-managed is not cheaper per hour of human attention. It is cheaper per band. If the only thing you actually need is more hands working the same ticket queue on the same 5 days, and your environment is simple, and your compliance exposure is low, a second hire can be the right buy at a worse price. Money is one axis.
Where the second hire finally wins
Every per-user contract has a headcount at which it stops being the bargain. Divide the loaded cost of the hire by the annual per-user rate and you get it directly.
| Per-user rate | Annual cost per user | Users where the hire costs less |
|---|---|---|
| $85 | $1,020 | 143 users |
| $100 | $1,200 | 121 users |
| $110 | $1,320 | 110 users |
| $130 | $1,560 | 93 users |
At $100 per user, the crossover is 121 people. You are at 75. You are 46 hires away from the point where the arithmetic reverses, and if you are growing at 10% a year, that is roughly 5 years out.
Read the bottom row carefully though, because it is the one that argues against us. At $130 per user the crossover drops to 93 people, which is close enough to 75 that growth could carry you past it inside 2 years. If a provider quotes you the top of the Texas band for a 75-seat environment, ask what is in that number. Sometimes the answer is real, like a regulated environment or 24-hour production. Sometimes it is just price.
Two people on days still leaves 76% of the year uncovered
A full-time employee is scheduled for 2,080 hours. Hire a second one and you have 4,160 scheduled hours on paper. You do not have 4,160 hours of coverage, because both of them are working the same window.
A calendar year is 8,760 hours. A standard 8-hour, 5-day business week covers 2,080 of them. So 2 sysadmins working days cover 23.7% of the year and leave 76.3% with nobody watching, exactly as 1 sysadmin did. You bought depth. You did not buy hours.
| Coverage measure | 1 sysadmin | 2 sysadmins | 1 sysadmin plus co-managed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hours of the year with someone accountable | 2,080 | 2,080 | 8,760 |
| Share of the calendar | 23.7% | 23.7% | 100% |
| Simultaneous incidents handled | 1 | 2 | Multiple |
| Coverage during a 2-week vacation | None | Reduced | Unchanged |
This matters more than it used to. CISA’s Cybersecurity Performance Goals 2.0, released in December 2025 and realigned to the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0, treats continuous detection and a defined response path as baseline expectations rather than enterprise luxuries. Cyber insurance underwriters have moved the same direction. In the renewals we sit in on, the question is no longer whether endpoint detection is installed. It is who is watching the alerts at 3 a.m. and how fast they act.
Texas law puts a clock on the answer. Under Chapter 521 of the Texas Business and Commerce Code, you have 60 days to notify affected residents after determining a breach occurred, and 30 days to notify the Attorney General when 250 or more Texans are involved. Those clocks start at determination. A breach that starts on a Friday night and is not detected until Monday has already spent 2 days of a countdown nobody was running.
One hire buys 1 skill band. You need 6.
This is the part the salary comparison misses entirely.
A 75-person company with a real network, a Microsoft 365 tenant, a firewall, backups, and any compliance exposure needs work from at least 6 distinct occupational bands, and none of those bands is optional once a cyber insurance renewal asks who owns each one. BLS prices each of them separately in Houston. Here they are, loaded at the same 1.43 factor.
| Skill band | Houston mean wage | Loaded at 1.43x | Hours you realistically need |
|---|---|---|---|
| User support specialist | $62,700 | $89,661 | Daily |
| Network support specialist | $76,560 | $109,481 | Weekly |
| Systems administrator | $108,200 | $154,726 | Daily |
| Computer systems analyst | $119,050 | $170,242 | Monthly |
| Network architect | $122,990 | $175,876 | A few hours a quarter |
| Information security analyst | $126,880 | $181,438 | Continuous, in small slices |
Buying 1 of each costs $881,424. You are not doing that. Nobody at 75 people is.
So you compromise, and the compromise is always the same. You hire 1 generalist and ask them to be all 6, which works until the quarter they need to be a security analyst and an architect in the same week, which is usually the quarter an acquisition, an office move, or an insurance renewal lands. Co-managed exists because those 6 bands have wildly different duty cycles. You need a network architect for maybe 12 hours a year. You cannot hire 12 hours of a $175,876 seat. You can rent it.
What Houston’s labor market says about your job posting
The BLS employment counts for the Houston metro describe the shape of the problem better than any staffing ratio does.
There are 12,840 user support specialists in the metro, 8,510 computer systems analysts, 6,330 systems administrators, 2,200 network architects, 2,110 information security analysts, and 1,990 network support specialists. Add the 6 bands together and you get 33,980 people. Sysadmins are 18.6% of it.
Look at what that implies. For every sysadmin in Houston there are roughly 2 user support specialists, because most IT work is support work and the market staffs accordingly. When you post a single sysadmin req and expect that person to also cover the help desk, the security queue, and the architecture calls, you are asking 1 hire from 18.6% of the labor pool to replace a market shape that took 6 job titles to build.
There is a trend worth knowing too. BLS projects employment for network and computer systems administrators to decline 4% nationally between 2025 and 2035, while security and analyst roles keep growing. The band you are about to hire into is the one automation is compressing. The bands it is not compressing are the ones you cannot afford full time.
The costs that show up in neither quote
Both options have expenses that live outside the number on the page. Price them before you decide.
- Vacancy. SHRM’s 2026 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking puts the median time to fill a nonexecutive role at 39 calendar days. Your existing person carries the full load for those 39 days, and that is from the day the req opens, not the day you start thinking about it, so a req approved in the first week of January is realistically covering nobody until the middle of February.
- Ramp. A new sysadmin in an undocumented environment is not net positive for 60 to 90 days. Frequently they make your existing person slower first, because every question routes through them.
- Tooling. Monitoring, endpoint detection, patch management, and backup licensing are bundled into a co-managed rate and itemized separately for an internal hire. At 75 seats this is a real 5-figure line.
- The single point of failure. A second hire fixes this. So does co-managed. It is the 1 argument for hiring that survives contact with the arithmetic, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a dismissal.
- Turnover. If your second hire leaves in 18 months, you pay the search, the vacancy, and the ramp again. A contract does not resign.
When hiring the second person is still right
We would rather tell you this now than 6 months into an engagement that was never going to fit.
Hire instead of contracting when your environment needs hands on physical equipment most days, which is common in manufacturing, energy, and healthcare with imaging on site, and in any environment where an outage on the plant floor costs more per hour than the whole IT budget costs per month. Hire when you run proprietary or heavily customized software that no outside team will ever learn well enough to support. Hire when headcount will realistically pass 120 inside 2 years, because you will cross the per-user line anyway and the ramp is better done early. Hire when IT is the product you sell.
And hire when the honest problem is that your 1 person is not strong enough. Co-managed amplifies an internal lead. It does not replace one. If the seat you have is the weak link, adding a partner underneath it usually surfaces that faster and more publicly than you expected, because a partner documents the environment and documentation makes gaps visible to everyone in the room. We have seen it play out both ways, and the version where the internal lead is strong is the one that works.
If your situation is the opposite, where the person is strong and simply alone, our page on co-managed IT for a one-person IT department covers what the split actually looks like day to day.
How to run this on your own numbers
Five steps. An hour of work, tops.
- Take the Houston loaded median of $145,045, or substitute your own offer at 1.43 times base.
- Multiply your user count by 12 and by the per-user rate you have been quoted. That is your co-managed year.
- Divide the loaded hire by the annual per-user cost. That is your crossover headcount.
- Compare the crossover to where you will be in 24 months, not where you are today.
- Count the skill bands your environment actually consumes in a year. If the answer is more than 2, the hire is covering 1 of them.
If the crossover sits above your 24-month headcount, the arithmetic says contract. If it sits below, hire. If it lands within 10 users of your projection, the money is a tie and you should decide on coverage and risk instead, which is where the 8,760-hour table earns its keep.
For the wider Texas context, including how the split is negotiated and what to watch in a contract, see our overview of co-managed IT in Texas. If you are already comparing providers, we ranked the field in our list of the best co-managed IT providers in Texas.
What Texas IT leaders ask before adding a second seat
Is co-managed IT cheaper than hiring IT staff?
At 75 users, yes, by roughly $55,000 a year. Co-managed at $100 per user runs $90,000 annually against $145,045 for a loaded second systems administrator in Houston. The advantage narrows as headcount grows and reverses near 121 users.
At what company size should we hire a second IT person instead?
Near 121 users at a $100 per-user rate, or 110 users at $110. Divide the fully loaded salary by the annual per-user cost to find your own line. Most Texas companies cross it between 100 and 145 employees.
Does co-managed IT mean my current IT person loses control?
No. In a properly structured co-managed agreement your internal lead keeps ownership of the environment, vendor relationships, and priorities. The partner takes the queue, the monitoring, and the specialist work. If a provider wants the keys and the decisions both, that is fully managed IT wearing a different label.
What does the 1.43 load factor include?
Payroll taxes, health insurance, retirement contributions, and paid leave. It comes from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, where total private-industry compensation was $46.60 per hour worked in the first quarter of 2026 against $32.60 in wages. Equipment, tooling seats, and recruiting fees sit on top of it.
Can we do co-managed for part of the environment only?
Yes, and it is common. Security-only and after-hours-only arrangements exist specifically for companies whose internal team handles daytime support well. Scoped engagements price lower than full co-managed because the platform line shrinks with them.
How long does co-managed onboarding take compared to hiring?
Two to 6 weeks for co-managed against 39 days to fill a role plus 60 to 90 days of ramp. The gap is wider than the calendar suggests, because a new hire in an undocumented environment temporarily slows down the person training them.
What happens to co-managed pricing as we grow past 100 people?
The per-user rate usually drops in tiers while the total climbs. Renegotiate at every 25 seats. Once your projected 24-month headcount clears the crossover you calculated, revisit the hire, because the answer genuinely changes on the other side of that line.
Run your own arithmetic with us
Bring your headcount, your current IT salary, and any quote you have in hand. We will build the crossover calculation with your real numbers and tell you which side of it you are on, including the cases where the answer is that you should hire and we are not the right spend. Our co-managed IT services start at $100 per user per month, and the scoping conversation costs nothing.
