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What Full-Stack Developers Earn Working for International Clients in Asia

A full-stack developer in Vietnam who already works for foreign companies earns $3,000 a month at the bottom of the range, more than three times the Indonesian floor. The figures below are what developers in each market earn working directly for foreign companies, before any employer or platform costs.

Monthly ranges from the Remote (Working for International Clients) figures on our rate cards for Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam and Taiwan, converted at ExchangeRate-API mid-market rates for 14 September 2026. Vietnam's card quotes US dollars. Taiwan's card covers senior full-stack developers only, and all five ranges are open at the top.

Local-market pay runs lower. ITviec's 2025-2026 salary report puts the median full-stack developer in Vietnam with 5 to 8 years of experience at 41.8 million dong a month, about $1,620, from a survey of IT workers in the country.

Through Second Talent, a senior full-stack developer starts from $2,999 a month: one monthly fee that bundles salary, payroll taxes, statutory contributions and our service fee. Our pricing page sets out the subscription.

US Pay Benchmark for Full-Stack Developers

The BLS definition of a web developer includes the duty to "optimize website performance, scalability, and server-side code and processes", which is the server half of a full-stack job. Full-stack developers still map to Software Developers (SOC 15-1252), because the role owns application logic and data models beyond the website, and the Stack Overflow median lands beside that occupation's pay.

Monthly figures are the annual wages on the OEWS profiles for 15-1252 and 15-1254 divided by 12, rounded to the nearest $10. The same survey counts 1,687,890 software developers and 70,190 web developers.

Salary is only part of the US cost. In the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for June 2026, wages and salaries made up 68.5% of employer compensation costs for full-time private industry workers, and benefits the other 31.5%. Our full-stack cost-to-hire page prices the US freelance and agency routes.

Time Zone Overlap with ET, CT and PT

None of the Asian cities below change their clocks. US daylight time runs from 8 March to 1 November 2026, per NIST, so the gap to New York widens by an hour in November.

After 1 November 2026, every time in the table moves one hour later.

The first cell: 9:00 am EDT is 13:00 UTC, and 13:00 plus eight hours is 21:00 in Manila. A full-stack developer on a shifted day still covers the hours that matter, from standup to the afternoon deploy:

• Manila, 5:00 pm to 2:00 am (09:00 to 18:00 UTC) covers 5:00 am to 2:00 pm in New York: five hours inside a 9-to-5 ET day, four with Chicago and two with San Francisco. From November it gives four hours with ET.
• Ho Chi Minh City, 3:00 pm to midnight (08:00 to 17:00 UTC) covers 4:00 am to 1:00 pm ET, four hours with New York and three with Chicago.

West Coast teams get the least live time, so move code review there to written handoffs: the developer opens pull requests before the Pacific morning and merges after your comments land. We set that schedule before the offer, which is how our placements get 4-6 hours of daily overlap with US hours.

Late hours cost more for employees. The Philippine Labor Code sets a night shift differential of at least 10% for each hour between 10 pm and 6 am (Article 86), so four hours of the Manila shift qualify. Vietnam's Labor Code counts 22:00 to 06:00 as night work and adds at least 30% (Articles 98 and 106), which covers the last two hours of the Ho Chi Minh City shift.

Full-Stack Developer Skills to Screen For

Test the parts of the stack the hire will run in production. Each area below comes with an exercise.

TypeScript on both sides of the API

GitHub's Octoverse report records August 2025 as the first month TypeScript overtook Python on GitHub, by contributor count. Types vanish at compile time, so ask how the candidate validates request bodies at runtime and shares one schema between server and client.

React and Next.js, with patch discipline

React disclosed CVE-2025-55182 on 3 December 2025: unauthenticated remote code execution in React Server Components, rated CVSS 10.0. Earlier that year Vercel patched a Next.js middleware bypass, CVE-2025-29927, and its postmortem advises against middleware as the only route protection. Ask a senior candidate what they upgraded that week and how long it took.

Node.js or Python on the server

Node.js was the most used web technology among professional developers in the 2025 survey, at 49.1%, with React at 46.9% and FastAPI at 15.1%. Test background jobs, retries and a webhook handler that must not charge a customer twice.

Full-stack JavaScript and the MERN stack

A full-stack JavaScript developer writes the database query, the Express or Next.js route and the React screen in one language, which is why the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React and Node.js) still appears in so many briefs. One language does not mean one skill. Ask the candidate when they would pick MongoDB over PostgreSQL for a feature, and how they would model a many-to-many relationship in each.

Then test the bug specific to this stack. When a route passes req.body straight into a MongoDB query, a client can send an operator such as { "$ne": null } in place of a password or an ID and match records it should never see. Plant that route in the take-home exercise, and score whether the candidate validates input with one schema shared by the React form and the API. A strong answer also covers how they review package-lock.json changes, since the client and the server pull from the same npm registry.

PostgreSQL and data modelling

PostgreSQL leads databases among professional developers at 58.2%, ahead of MySQL at 39.6%. Give the candidate a schema change on a table that already holds production data and ask for the migration, the index and the rollback.

Access control

The OWASP Top 10:2025 ranks broken access control as A01, its top risk. A strong full-stack developer spots an API route that checks for a signed-in user but not whether that user owns the record. Plant that bug in the code review exercise.

Reviewing AI-generated code

Half of professional developers (50.6%) used AI tools daily in Stack Overflow's 2025 AI results, and 66% of all respondents named "AI solutions that are almost right, but not quite" as a frustration. Hand the candidate an AI-written pull request and score what they catch.

Senior full-stack developers who own a feature

Seniority on a full-stack team shows in sequencing, not in the number of frameworks on a CV. A senior developer ships a change that touches the schema, the API and the UI without a broken deploy in between: add the new column, write to both shapes, backfill, switch reads, then drop the old column in a later release. Hand the candidate a brief that renames a field used by both a mobile client and the web app, and ask for the order of pull requests and what each one can roll back.

Also ask about the last feature they owned after launch: which metric or error rate they watched, what they changed after the first week, and which part they handed to a specialist. A senior hire knows where their depth ends, whether that is a tricky index, a design-system component or a cloud networking rule.

Contractor or Employer of Record for a US Company

Software is not one of the nine categories of commissioned work that can be "work made for hire" under 17 U.S.C. § 101. Code an independent contractor writes stays theirs until they transfer it, and a transfer must be in writing and signed under § 204(a). Put the IP assignment in the contract before the first commit.

Tax follows where the work happens. IRS Publication 515 says the place where services are performed determines the source of the income, so a developer working from Manila earns foreign-source income. The developer gives you Form W-8BEN to certify foreign status.

The developer's own country applies its own employment test:

• Vietnam: under Article 13 of the 2019 Labor Code, an agreement under another name that covers a paid job, wages and one party's management and supervision counts as a labor contract.
• Philippines: courts apply the four-fold test (selection, wages, dismissal, control), and in Atok Big Wedge v. Gison the Supreme Court called control the most important of the four.

A full-time developer who attends your standups, takes your tickets and works your hours fits both descriptions.

Contractor agreements fit scoped projects. A developer inside your sprint cadence is the case an Employer of Record covers, and our Vietnam EOR page lists the employer contributions to budget for. This is a summary, not legal advice.

English Level and Working Norms

Indonesia's IT workers score 523 on the EF English Proficiency Index 2025, 52 points above the country's overall 471. The index covers 123 countries and regions, with a global average of 488.

Scores come from EF's country pages, such as the Philippines and Indonesia. The 2025 edition publishes no score for Taiwan, so test written English there in the assessment.

Most full-stack work reaches your US team in writing: pull request descriptions, migration notes and incident summaries. Ask for one of each during the assessment.

Plan releases around both calendars. Thanksgiving on 26 November 2026 is a normal working day across Asia, so a developer there can watch production while your US team is off.

Article 112 of Vietnam's Labor Code gives five paid days for Lunar New Year, in late January or February, so keep launches out of that week with a Vietnam-based developer and name a US engineer on call.

Full-Stack Developer Hiring Process

Second Talent's vetting covers stages 2 to 5 before you see a profile. Our full-stack interview guide has question sets for your own final round.

Stage 1: Define what the hire owns Write down which half of the stack the developer will run in production, the framework versions in use and the overlap window. A React-heavy role and a Postgres-heavy role share the title and need different tests.

Stage 2: Application review We look for shipped, running software: a deployed app, a repository with recent commits, or a product the candidate can demo. We ask who operated it after launch.

Stage 3: Skills assessment The candidate builds one small feature that needs a database migration, an API endpoint and a React component, with a planted access-control bug. We score the pull request description as well as the code.

Stage 4: Live technical interview with a senior engineer A senior engineer walks through the assessment, then reviews an AI-generated diff with the candidate and asks how they would upgrade a Next.js app after a critical React advisory.

Stage 5: Background and reference checks We ask former managers about reliability across a shifted schedule and the quality of written handoffs. You then sign with the IP assignment in place, as a contractor agreement or through an EOR.

Hire Full-Stack Developers from Asia with Second Talent

We shortlist 6-8 candidates within 24 hours from 100,000+ pre-vetted engineers, accepting only the top 1% of applicants. Full-stack developers start from $2,999 a month, with $0 upfront, no lock-in and 4-6 hours of daily overlap with US hours. We handle contracts, payroll and equipment, with compliant EOR contracts and payroll in 9 Asian markets.

Our pricing page covers subscription, direct-hire and EOR pricing. Truckstop, the US freight technology company, hired eight engineers in Vietnam through us, three of them full-stack developers, at an average of 22 days to hire, according to the Truckstop case study.