TL;DR: PHP developers in the Philippines earn $2,200 to $6,500 a month working for international clients on our rate card, and we shortlist 6-8 candidates within 24 hours. The closest US benchmark, the BLS median for software developers, was $135,980 a year in May 2025.
On JobStreet's Philippine salary pages, PHP developer ads pay a median of ₱90,000 a month and list Laravel and API work. PHP web developer ads pay ₱50,000 and list WordPress and Bootstrap. The job title on your brief decides which pool answers it.
Key takeaways
- JobStreet lists jQuery among the skills for PHP developers in the Philippines, and jQuery 4.0 removed jQuery.trim and a dozen other deprecated functions.
- PHP 8.2 stops receiving security fixes on 31 December 2026, a special non-working day in the Philippines.
- Black Friday sales that open at midnight Eastern on 27 November 2026 open at 1:00 pm in Manila.
- Cyber Monday, 30 November 2026, is Bonifacio Day, a regular holiday on which Philippine employees who work earn twice their regular rate.
What PHP Developers Earn in the Philippines Working for International Clients
The Philippine card has the highest fixed ceiling of the five markets below, and its floor sits $10 under Malaysia's. The figures are what PHP developers in each market earn working directly for foreign companies, before any employer or platform costs.
| Market |
Monthly pay working for international clients (USD) |
| Philippines |
$2,200-$6,500 |
| Indonesia |
$1,200-$4,500 |
| India |
$1,360-$5,540+ |
| Vietnam |
$1,800-$4,200 |
| Malaysia |
$2,210-$6,270+ |
Monthly ranges from the Remote (Working for International Clients) figures on our rate cards for the Philippines, Indonesia, India, Vietnam and Malaysia, converted at ExchangeRate-API mid-market rates for 14 September 2026.
The Philippine card quotes US dollars, so that row needs no conversion. Its range spans $4,300 from floor to ceiling, so place each candidate by the work they have shipped.
Local employers pay well under the floor. JobStreet's PHP developer salary page, built from salary ranges employers disclose in Philippine job ads, puts the middle half at ₱85,000 to ₱95,000 a month ($1,360 to $1,520). Its 90th percentile, ₱105,000 or $1,670, sits $530 below the card's floor.
The PHP web developer page puts the median at ₱50,000 ($800). Budget from the foreign-client row, since that is the range your offer competes in.
Through Second Talent you pay one monthly fee that bundles salary, payroll taxes, statutory contributions and our service fee, quoted per role and market. Our pricing page explains the monthly subscription, and our PHP developers page compares the wider pool in Asia.
US Pay Benchmark for PHP Developers
PHP developers map to Software Developers (15-1252), because most of the work is application logic, APIs and data models. Web Developers (15-1254) sits alongside for WordPress and storefront roles, the other half of the JobStreet split above.
| BLS OEWS, May 2025, national |
Software Developers (15-1252) |
Web Developers (15-1254) |
| Median annual |
$135,980 |
$92,650 |
| 10th percentile, monthly |
$6,870 |
$4,010 |
| 25th percentile, monthly |
$8,770 |
$5,350 |
| Median, monthly |
$11,330 |
$7,720 |
| 75th percentile, monthly |
$14,330 |
$10,520 |
| 90th percentile, monthly |
$17,890 |
$13,520 |
Monthly figures are the annual wages on the OEWS profiles for 15-1252 and 15-1254 divided by 12, rounded to the nearest $10.
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%.
For contract work, our PHP developer cost-to-hire page and Laravel developer cost-to-hire page set out US freelance rates.
Time Zone Overlap: Manila Against ET, CT and PT
A store that opens Black Friday sales at midnight Eastern on 27 November 2026 opens them at 1:00 pm in Manila.
US clocks will have gone back by then: midnight EST (UTC-5) is 05:00 UTC, and 05:00 UTC is 1:00 pm at UTC+8. A Manila developer on a day shift is at work for the first five hours of the sale.
Manila keeps UTC+8 all year. US daylight time runs from 8 March to 1 November 2026, per NIST. The arithmetic for the table: 9:00 am EDT (UTC-4) is 13:00 UTC and 9:00 pm in Manila, while 9:00 am EST is 14:00 UTC and 10:00 pm.
| Manila shift (UTC+8) |
ET overlap (EDT / EST) |
CT overlap (CDT / CST) |
PT overlap (PDT / PST) |
Hours between 10 pm and 6 am |
| 9 am-6 pm |
0 / 0 |
0 / 0 |
0 / 0 |
0 |
| 2 pm-11 pm |
2 / 1 |
1 / 0 |
0 / 0 |
1 |
| 5 pm-2 am |
5 / 4 |
4 / 3 |
2 / 1 |
4 |
| 8 pm-5 am |
8 / 7 |
7 / 6 |
5 / 4 |
7 |
Each shift is nine clock hours with a meal break, counted against a 9 am to 5 pm US day.
The day shift is the maintenance row. A Manila day from 01:00 to 10:00 UTC runs from 9:00 pm to 6:00 am in New York under daylight time, so plugin updates, cache rebuilds and database migrations land while US shoppers sleep. The 5 pm to 2 am row suits a developer who pairs with your product team on features.
The late rows cost more for employees. The Labor Code sets a night shift differential of at least 10% for each hour between 10 pm and 6 am (Article 86), seven of the nine clock hours in the last row. We agree the shift before the offer, which is how our placements get 4-6 hours of daily overlap with US hours.
PHP Developer Skills to Screen For
JobStreet's PHP developer page lists PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, Laravel, CSS, Git, HTML, API work, jQuery and web applications. The list pairs Laravel with jQuery, a library first released in 2006, so screen for both ends of that range.
PHP version upgrades
The PHP supported versions page ends security fixes for PHP 8.2 on 31 December 2026, for 8.3 on 31 December 2027 and for 8.4 on 31 December 2028. The web lags behind.
W3Techs finds version 7 on 28.2% of the websites that use PHP. Give the candidate a PHP 7.4 app with a composer.json and ask for the upgrade order, with the tests that prove each step.
Laravel release and support cycles
Laravel's release notes give each major version 18 months of bug fixes and 2 years of security fixes. Laravel 12 security fixes end on 24 February 2027. Laravel 13, released on 17 March 2026, requires PHP 8.3 and adds a first-party AI SDK for text generation, tool-calling agents and embeddings.
Ask how the candidate moved an app across two major versions, and what they did about packages that had not caught up. For framework-only work we also staff Laravel developers in the Philippines.
Symfony long-term support
Symfony 7.4, the current long-term support release, came out in November 2025 with bug fixes until November 2028 and security fixes until November 2029. It requires PHP 8.2 or higher. The previous LTS, Symfony 6.4, stops receiving bug fixes in November 2026. Ask the candidate which deprecations they would clear before moving a 6.4 app to 7.4.
WordPress, WooCommerce and Magento
WordPress runs 40.3% of all websites, per W3Techs, and much PHP work sits in its themes, plugins and WooCommerce stores.
Magento shows the patching risk. CVE-2024-34102, an XML external entity flaw in Adobe Commerce and Magento Open Source rated 9.8, entered CISA's Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog on 17 July 2024, per its NVD record. Ask how the candidate tracks patches for the platform and each plugin, and how they test checkout after one.
jQuery in inherited front ends
The jQuery team released jQuery 4.0.0 on 17 January 2026, its first major version in almost 10 years. It drops Internet Explorer 10 and older and removes deprecated functions including jQuery.trim, jQuery.isArray and jQuery.parseJSON. A theme or Blade view that calls them breaks on upgrade. Hand the candidate a page script that uses three of them and ask for the native replacements.
Contractor or Employer of Record in the Philippines
Software is not one of the nine categories of commissioned work that can be "work made for hire" under 17 U.S.C. § 101, and a transfer must be in writing and signed under § 204(a). On the Philippine side, section 178.4 of the Intellectual Property Code leaves copyright in a commissioned work with its creator unless a written stipulation says otherwise. List the application code, custom plugins, themes and private Composer packages in the assignment.
IRS Publication 515 says the place where services are performed determines the source of the income, so a developer working from Cebu or Iloilo earns foreign-source income. A foreign individual gives the payer Form W-8BEN to certify foreign status.
Philippine courts apply the four-fold test: selection and engagement, payment of wages, the power of dismissal and the power to control the work. In Atok Big Wedge v. Gison the Supreme Court called control the most important of the four. A fixed-scope theme build suits a contractor agreement. A developer who owns your store's uptime, works your hours and holds admin access to production meets the test.
A self-employed developer registered with the BIR can elect the 8% income tax option on gross receipts above ₱250,000. Employment brings four statutory lines instead:
Worked examples sit in our Philippines payroll, benefits and tax guide. Our Employer of Record service employs the developer for you, and the Philippines EOR page covers the local details. This is a summary, not legal advice.
|
Independent contractor |
Employer of Record |
| Legal employer |
None; the developer invoices you |
The EOR's Philippine entity |
| US paperwork |
Form W-8BEN from the developer |
Service agreement with the EOR |
| IP |
Written assignment covering code, plugins, themes and packages (IP Code 178.4) |
Employer owns work from regular duties (IP Code 178.3), passed on through your EOR agreement |
| Local labor law |
Four-fold test risk if you control hours and methods |
Night differential, holiday pay and 13th month pay apply |
| Pay currency |
Agreed in the contract, often USD |
Peso payroll run by the EOR |
English Level and Working Norms in the Philippines
The Philippines scores 581 for the IT job function on the EF English Proficiency Index 2025, above its national score of 569, which ranks 28th of 123 countries and regions against a global average of 488, per EF's Philippines page. Writing scores 603 and speaking 539.
A lot of PHP work reaches readers who are not engineers: a store owner asking why checkout failed, a marketing lead asking for a plugin. Ask finalists to write a short incident note from a log excerpt, addressed to that reader.
The 2026 holiday proclamation makes Bonifacio Day, Monday 30 November, a regular holiday. That is Cyber Monday in the US, and Article 94 of the Labor Code pays an employee who works a regular holiday twice the regular rate, so agree cover and pay before the sale.
December adds Christmas Day and Rizal Day on 25 and 30 December, with 24 and 31 December as special non-working days. PHP 8.2's last security day is 31 December, so finish that upgrade before the month starts.
Thanksgiving on 26 November 2026 is a working day in the Philippines, and a developer there can prepare the Black Friday deploy while your US team is off.
PHP Developer Hiring Process in the Philippines
Second Talent's vetting covers stages 2 to 5 before you see a profile.
Stage 1: Define what the hire owns
You name the PHP version in production, the framework or platform (Laravel, Symfony, WordPress, Magento), the hosting and whether an upgrade is on the roadmap. Say whether the job is application development or site work, since the two titles draw different pools in the Philippines.
Stage 2: Application review
We look for systems the candidate ran after launch: an app they upgraded across major versions, a store they kept patched through a sale, a package they maintain. Scale goes in plain numbers, such as orders a day or requests a minute.
Stage 3: Skills assessment
The candidate takes a small legacy app with a jQuery front end, upgrades it to a supported PHP version with passing tests, and fixes a planted SQL injection. We score the commit history and the upgrade notes along with the code.
Stage 4: Live technical interview with a senior engineer
A senior engineer reviews the assessment with the candidate in English, then runs a sale-day scenario: checkout slows at 1:00 pm Manila time, the query log shows an N+1 problem, and a plugin update is waiting.
Stage 5: Background and reference checks
We ask former managers about production incidents, patch discipline and how the developer handed over admin credentials when they left. You then choose the contractor or EOR route above.
Hire PHP Developers from the Philippines with Second Talent
We shortlist 6-8 candidates within 24 hours from 100,000+ pre-vetted engineers, accepting only the top 1% of applicants. PHP developers from the Philippines come 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 in the Philippines.
Our pricing page sets out the monthly subscription, and for content-heavy sites we also staff WordPress developers in the Philippines.
