A line-by-line cost breakdown of hiring a UK SDR versus paying an agency per booked meeting — including the costs most founders leave out of the spreadsheet.
By Moe Alhosni, founder of ROI Maximizer. Published 12 August 2026.
Short answer: A single UK SDR realistically costs £60,000–£80,000 in year one once you add employer NI, pension, recruitment fees, tooling and the three-month ramp during which they book almost nothing. A pay-per-result agency costs you nothing until a qualified meeting appears in your calendar. The in-house hire wins on long-term control and account knowledge; the agency wins on speed, downside risk and cash flow. Below is the arithmetic, with every assumption labelled.
All salary and tooling figures below are illustrative UK market estimates for 2026, not client data and not quotes. Use them as a template for your own spreadsheet, not as a price list.
Founders almost always model base salary and stop. That is the number that gets the hire approved, and it is roughly half the truth.
Here is the full stack for one mid-market SDR in the UK:
| Cost component | Illustrative annual estimate | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Base salary | £32,000 | Typical UK SDR/BDR base band runs roughly £30k–£45k |
| Commission at target | £12,000 | On-target earnings, not guaranteed |
| Employer National Insurance | ~£6,000 | 13.8% on earnings above the threshold |
| Pension contribution | ~£1,300 | Auto-enrolment minimum on qualifying earnings |
| Recruitment fee | £4,800–£8,000 | Commonly 15–25% of base, one-off |
| Sales tooling | £3,000–£6,000 | CRM seat, data/enrichment, sequencer, dialler, inbox infrastructure |
| Laptop, onboarding, admin | £1,500 | One-off |
| Subtotal, year one | £60,600–£66,800 | Before management time |
Then add the cost nobody puts in the spreadsheet: management overhead. A new SDR needs call reviews, sequence feedback, list approvals and pipeline inspection. Three to five hours a week from a sales leader or founder is normal in the first six months. If that person's fully-loaded cost is £100,000, four hours a week is roughly £10,000 of their year.
Realistic year-one total: £70,000–£77,000 for one SDR.
An SDR does not produce from week one. Industry norm is meaningful productivity around month three — the first two months go on product training, ICP learning, messaging iteration, and building the sender infrastructure that keeps their email out of spam.
So you are paying roughly £12,000–£15,000 of fully-loaded cost before the first consistent meeting lands. With a three-to-four month B2B sales cycle on top, the first closed deal attributable to that hire typically arrives around month seven.
That is not an argument against hiring. It is an argument for knowing what you signed up for.
Quota attainment. Only around two thirds of UK SDRs hit quota. OTE is a target, not a forecast. If you build a business case on target performance, you are modelling the best case as the base case.
Tenure. Average SDR tenure sits around 1.5–1.9 years. If they leave at month 20, you have spent roughly £110,000 across two years and you are back at the recruitment fee, the ramp, and the management drag — with the prospect relationships walking out the door in their head, not your CRM.
The model is structurally different, so compare the mechanism, not just the invoice.
At ROI Maximizer we charge per booked, qualified meeting — not a monthly retainer. There is no fixed cost sitting on your P&L in a slow month. If the meetings do not appear, you do not pay for them.
That inverts the risk. With an in-house hire, you carry the cost of a bad month. With pay-per-result, we do.
Two consequences worth being honest about:
| Milestone | In-house SDR | Pay-per-result agency |
|---|---|---|
| Decision to first outreach | 8–14 weeks (hire, notice period, onboard) | Outreach begins within 14–21 days of signing |
| First decision-maker meetings | ~Month 3 | Most clients: 3–4 weeks |
| Cost incurred before first meeting | £12,000–£15,000 fully loaded | £0 |
| Cost in a month with no output | Full monthly burn | £0 |
Across our client base, the average is qualified sales calls every month. To match that with in-house headcount you are not hiring one SDR — you are hiring a small team, plus the manager to run it.
I run an agency and I will still say this plainly: hire in-house when
And the honest disqualifier for both options: if you have never closed a deal from outbound, do not hire anyone yet. Not an SDR, not us. Do fifty manual outreaches yourself first. If nobody wants the meeting when the founder asks, nobody will want it when a stranger asks. Outsourcing an unvalidated motion just buys you a faster, more expensive no.
Stop comparing salary to invoice. Compare cost per qualified meeting, and compare it over twelve months rather than one.
Take the in-house figure of roughly £72,000 fully loaded. If that SDR books 12 qualified meetings a month from month four onward, that is 108 meetings in year one — around £670 per meeting, and that assumes they hit target and stay.
Now run the same maths on your agency quote. Divide the annual spend by the meetings you actually expect to hold, not the ones promised on the call. Then adjust for two things: how much of the cost is fixed regardless of output, and what happens to the number if the year goes badly.
That single ratio, stress-tested against a bad quarter, tells you more than any pricing page.
The £670 figure above assumes 12 qualified meetings a month. That is the first assumption I would challenge. Twelve is a good month, not an average.
The benchmark I trust most is The Bridge Group's 2025 SDR Models, Motions and Metrics report (351 B2B companies, published 6 February 2025). I checked the page in October 2026. Its global median monthly quota is 10 held meetings, down 40% since 2018. Split by how strictly "meeting" is defined, the quota is 16.0 for introductory meetings, 10.4 for semi-qualified and 9.0 for fully qualified. Only 60% of SDRs hit quota, the lowest in the study's history. Two caveats: these are quotas, not bookings, and the sample is 78% North American and 83% B2B SaaS, so it is not UK data.
Why the number moves:
The arithmetic in reverse, at £72,000 fully loaded over nine productive months:
| Qualified meetings a month | Meetings in year one | Cost per qualified meeting |
|---|---|---|
| 12 (assumed above) | 108 | £670 |
| 9 (Bridge Group fully-qualified quota) | 81 | £890 |
| 8 (just under quota) | 72 | £1,000 |
| 6 | 54 | £1,330 |
Put 8 in your spreadsheet: a shade under the 9.0 quota, which only 60% of reps reach. That makes an in-house SDR about £1,000 per qualified meeting, which is the number to set against any agency quote. The ROI calculator runs the same sum with your deal size on top.
If you want a version of this table with your own numbers in it — your ICP, your deal size, your realistic meeting volume — I am happy to build it with you on a call, whether or not you end up working with us. Book 20 minutes, or email me directly at moe@roimaxi.com.
Moe Alhosni is the founder of ROI Maximizer (M Ventures LTD, Bath). Eight-plus years in B2B pipeline growth, previously at Moody's and in high-growth startups.
Or run the free GTM teardown on your own site for the ICP, cold email and numbers specific to your company.