Hire WordPress Developers in the Philippines

What WordPress Developers Earn in the Philippines Working for International Clients

The Philippine floor sits $20 above Thailand's, while its $4,070+ top sits $940 above Vietnam's and $1,800 above Indonesia's. The figures are what WordPress 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 the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, converted at ExchangeRate-API mid-market rates for 14 September 2026.

The Philippine card quotes ₱95,000 to ₱255,000+ a month, converted at ₱62.69 to the dollar.

Local WordPress pay runs close to that floor. On JobStreet's WordPress developer salary page, built from pay that employers disclose in Philippine job ads, the middle half runs ₱83,000 to ₱93,000 a month ($1,320 to $1,480) and the 90th percentile reaches ₱103,000 ($1,640). The card's ₱95,000 floor sits between those two local figures. The same board's web developer page has a median of ₱40,000, so Philippine employers price WordPress as a specialism, not general web work.

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 subscription, and our WordPress developers page compares markets across Asia.

US Pay Benchmark for WordPress Developers

BLS has no WordPress occupation. Site builds, themes and upkeep map to Web Developers (15-1254), and plugin, block and WooCommerce extension work maps to Software Developers (15-1252).

Monthly figures are the annual wages on the BLS OEWS profiles for 15-1254 and 15-1252 divided by 12, rounded to the nearest $10.

Match the column to the job. A care-plan developer who keeps twenty client sites patched compares with web developers, and one who owns custom checkout code on a store compares with software 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%.

For a one-off build, our WordPress developer cost-to-hire page sets out US contract rates.

Time Zone Overlap: Manila Against ET, CT and PT

A Manila developer on an ordinary 9 am to 6 pm day works while US shoppers sleep, which is when plugin updates, backups and cache rebuilds do the least damage. Manila keeps UTC+8 all year with no daylight saving time, and US clocks stay on daylight time from 8 March to 1 November 2026, per NIST.

The arithmetic: 9:00 am in Manila is 01:00 UTC, which is 6:00 pm the previous evening in San Francisco under PDT (UTC-7) and 9:00 pm in New York under EDT (UTC-4). The Manila day ends at 10:00 UTC, 3:00 am Pacific and 6:00 am Eastern.

Each shift is nine clock hours with a meal break, counted against a 9 am to 5 pm US day.

The 1 pm to 10 pm row buys a New York marketing team one live hour in summer for launch checks, with no hours in the night band. A store that needs someone on hand during a US sale needs the last two rows.

For employees, the Labor Code sets a night shift differential of at least 10% of the regular wage for each hour between 10 pm and 6 am (Article 86). That covers five hours of the 6 pm row and eight of the nine in the last.

We agree the shift before the offer, which is how our placements get 4-6 hours of daily overlap with US hours.

WordPress Developer Skills to Screen For

JobStreet's Philippine page lists Elementor and search engine optimisation among the skills employers want in WordPress ads, next to PHP, JavaScript and CSS. Those skills serve marketing sites. A US store or plugin product needs more from the same developer.

The block editor after WordPress 7.1

WordPress 7.1 shipped on 19 August 2026, and its release post says the post editor is now fully iframed for all themes, with the editing canvas running apart from the admin screens. The Plugin Check tool now flags blocks below apiVersion 3 for the iframe editor in WordPress 7.0 and later. Ask the candidate which of their blocks broke in the iframe, and what they changed in block.json.

PHP upgrades before 2027

PHP 8.2 security support ends on 31 December 2026, per php.net. WordPress's requirements page recommends PHP 8.3 or greater and warns that sites still running PHP 7.4 are on an end-of-life version. On the WordPress.org stats, 24.8% of sites report PHP 8.2 and 17.0% still report 7.4. Ask how the candidate would test a store's plugins against PHP 8.3 before the host switches.

WooCommerce order storage

WooCommerce turned on High-Performance Order Storage by default for new stores from version 8.2 in October 2023, moving orders out of the posts and postmeta tables. Hand the candidate a small extension that calls get_post_meta() on an order ID and ask for the HPOS-compatible version.

Access control in plugin code

Broken Access Control was the most exploited vulnerability type in Patchstack's 2026 report. WordPress's nonces documentation states that nonces "should never be relied on for authentication, authorization, or access control" and points to current_user_can(). Show the candidate an AJAX handler that checks a nonce and nothing else, and score whether they add the capability check.

Patch windows on Manila time

Patchstack counted 11,334 new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2025, 42% more than in 2024, with 91% of them in plugins. For 46%, no fix existed at public disclosure, and the median time to mass exploitation for heavily exploited flaws was 5 hours.

A flaw disclosed at 6:00 pm Pacific lands at 9:00 am the next day in Manila while US daylight time lasts, so a developer on the day shift can patch within those first 5 hours while your team sleeps. Ask for their update routine: staging, a restored backup and the rule for a plugin with no fix.

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). Section 178.4 of the Philippine Intellectual Property Code keeps copyright in a commissioned work with its creator unless a written stipulation says otherwise. Name themes, plugins, blocks and WooCommerce extensions in the assignment.

Decide early which of those stay private. The plugin directory guidelines require everything hosted on WordPress.org to comply with the GPL or a GPL-compatible licence.

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 one-off theme build can sit with a contractor, while a developer who works your support queue on hours you set meets the test. Employment brings four statutory lines:

• 13th month pay: one twelfth of basic salary, paid to rank-and-file employees by 24 December under PD 851 as amended by Memorandum Order 28.
• SSS: 15% of the monthly salary credit, shared by employer and employee, with the credit capped at ₱35,000.
• PhilHealth: 5% of monthly income, with the cap at ₱100,000.
• Pag-IBIG: 2% each side on a salary capped at ₱10,000, per the February 2024 increase.

Our Philippines payroll, benefits and tax guide runs the employer numbers. 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.

English Level and Working Norms in the Philippines

Marketing staff in the Philippines score 600 on the EF English Proficiency Index 2025, and IT staff 581, per EF's Philippines page. The national score is 569, 28th of 123 countries and regions against a global average of 488, with writing at 603 and speaking at 539.

City scores spread wider. Cebu City scores 585 and Davao City 579, while Bacolod scores 547 and Iloilo 546. A WordPress developer writes for editors and marketers as well as engineers, so run one assessment step in plain English for a non-technical reader, whichever city the candidate works from.

Plan the US holiday season around the Philippine calendar. Proclamation 1006 makes Bonifacio Day on Monday 30 November a regular holiday, which is Cyber Monday in the US, and Article 94 of the Labor Code pays an employee twice the regular rate for working on it. Agree store cover for that day before November.

Thanksgiving on 26 November 2026 is a working day in the Philippines, so a developer there can watch your store through the Black Friday build-up while your US team is off.

WordPress 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 say whether the job is a care plan across many sites, a WooCommerce store or plugin engineering, and list the page builder, the PHP version and the host. Pick a Manila shift from the table above.

Stage 2: Application review We look for sites the candidate still maintains and code they can show: a plugin repository, a block library or a speed fix with before-and-after numbers. A portfolio of finished page builder sites does not pass alone.

Stage 3: Skills assessment The candidate fixes a block that breaks in the iframed editor, makes an order-reading extension HPOS-compatible and adds a capability check to an AJAX handler. They write a change note an editor could follow.

Stage 4: Live technical interview with a senior engineer A senior engineer reviews the fixes in English, then sets a scenario: a vendor discloses a plugin flaw with no patch at 9 pm Manila time, on a store running a US sale.

Stage 5: Background and reference checks We ask former clients and managers how the candidate handled updates, backups and admin access, and whether they stayed through long maintenance contracts. You then choose the contractor or EOR route above.

Hire WordPress 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. WordPress 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 custom PHP work behind a site we also staff PHP developers in the Philippines.