What a 24×7 NOC really costs to run in-house
Most build-versus-buy conversations start with one number: the salary of a NOC engineer. That number is wrong, and it is wrong in a direction that consistently makes building look cheaper than it is.
Here is the full cost of genuine 24×7 coverage, in the order it actually lands on your P&L.
You cannot staff 24×7 with three people
This is the single most common modelling error. There are 168 hours in a week. A full-time engineer covers around 37.5 of them. Divide one by the other and you get 4.5 — so people budget four or five heads and move on.
That maths assumes nobody takes leave, nobody is sick, nobody trains, and nobody resigns. Once you build in statutory holiday, sick cover, training days and a realistic attrition buffer, a genuine follow-the-sun rota with no single points of failure needs six to seven people minimum. Ask anyone who has run a rota with five: the fifth person becomes a permanent on-call backstop, and they leave within a year.
The shift premium nobody budgets for
Base salary is the sticker price. Overnight and weekend work carries a premium almost everywhere — a shift differential in the US, unsocial hours payments in the UK — and it typically adds 15–30% to the base for the engineers carrying nights and weekends.
Then there is the second-order cost: overnight roles have materially higher turnover than day roles. Every departure costs you recruitment, onboarding, and three to six months before the replacement is genuinely useful on your estate.
Employment cost is not salary
The fully loaded cost of an employee runs well above their salary once you add employer taxes, pension or 401(k) contributions, insurance, equipment, software seats and a share of premises. The multiplier varies by country but 1.25–1.4× base is a reasonable planning figure in both the US and UK.
Apply that to six or seven heads with a night premium on top and the picture changes considerably from "four salaries".
Tooling is the small number
Monitoring platform, alerting and on-call rotation, ticketing integration, remote access, documentation and a status page — for a mid-sized MSP estate this typically lands in the low thousands per month.
Tooling is genuinely not where the money goes. It is worth saying plainly, because vendor comparison articles obsess over licence costs while the staffing line is an order of magnitude larger.
The costs that never make the spreadsheet
These are the ones that decide whether a build succeeds.
Runbook development. Someone senior has to write, test and maintain the procedures your L1 follows. This is weeks of your best engineer's time up front and a permanent maintenance cost after.
Alert tuning. An untuned estate generates far more alerts than any human can read. The first pass is weeks of work, and it is a quarterly habit thereafter — see our piece on cutting RMM alert noise for what that involves.
Management overhead. Six or seven engineers on a rota need a shift lead, a rota owner and someone handling escalation quality. That is either a hire or a meaningful slice of an existing manager's week.
Opportunity cost. Every hour your senior engineers spend covering L1 gaps is an hour not spent on billable project work. For most MSPs this is the largest hidden number of the lot.
What it looks like versus outsourcing
The honest comparison is not "salary versus invoice". It is:
| In-house | Outsourced |
|---|---|
| 6–7 FTE fully loaded, with night premium | Per-endpoint monthly fee |
| Recruitment and attrition risk on you | Absorbed by the provider |
| Runbook and tuning effort on your seniors | Included in onboarding |
| Rota management overhead | None |
| Fixed cost regardless of volume | Scales with endpoints |
| Capacity ceiling until you hire again | Capacity available immediately |
The structural difference is that in-house coverage is a step cost and outsourced coverage is a variable cost. You cannot hire 0.4 of a night engineer. You can add forty endpoints.
When building genuinely is the right answer
Outsourcing is not always correct, and any provider who tells you otherwise is selling.
Build in-house when NOC capability is a core differentiator you intend to sell, when your scale is large enough that a full rota is efficiently utilised, or when contractual or sovereignty constraints genuinely require your own staff. At sufficient scale the unit economics do flip in favour of building.
Below that, you are paying for a rota you cannot keep busy.
The question worth asking
Not "what does a NOC engineer cost?" but "what does it cost me to be unable to say yes to 24×7 in a contract?" For most growing MSPs the deals lost on that line item dwarf either side of the build-versus-buy calculation.
NOC247 provides 24×7 white-label NOC coverage for MSPs on a per-endpoint basis. If you want the comparison run against your actual numbers, book a scoping call or see our coverage packages.