Hire Web Developers

What Web Developers Earn Working for International Clients in Asia

China's ceiling, $17,120+, is more than five times the Philippine ceiling of $3,190+, and the Vietnamese and Indonesian ranges sit within $130 of each other at both ends. Each figure is what web developers in that 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, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and China, converted at ExchangeRate-API mid-market rates for 14 September 2026.

All five cards quote local currency with an open top, such as ₱80,000 to ₱200,000+ on the Philippine card, so a senior offer can pass the printed figure.

Through Second Talent, senior web developers start from $23 USD/hr (billed monthly): one monthly fee that bundles salary, payroll taxes, statutory contributions and our service fee. Our pricing page explains how the subscription works.

US Pay Benchmark for Web Developers

BLS has a Web Developers occupation (15-1254), and it fits a hire who builds and maintains websites. A web developer who spends most of the week on application code, such as a customer portal or a checkout, maps better to Software Developers (15-1252), so the table shows both.

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.

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%.

Time Zone Overlap with ET, CT and PT

A DNS cutover or a theme release is safest when US traffic is lowest, and 6:00 am in New York is 5:00 pm in Bangkok, the middle of a developer's working day. US daylight time runs from 8 March to 1 November 2026, per NIST, and none of the Asian cities below change their clocks.

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

The arithmetic for the launch window: 6:00 am EDT is 10:00 UTC, and 10:00 UTC plus seven hours is 17:00 in Bangkok or Jakarta. Two schedules that work for web teams:

• Bangkok or Jakarta, 4:00 pm to 1:00 am (09:00 to 18:00 UTC) covers 5:00 am to 2:00 pm EDT. That gives five hours of a 9-to-5 day in New York, four with Chicago and two with San Francisco, plus a launch slot before US traffic climbs.
• Manila, 3:00 pm to midnight (07:00 to 16:00 UTC) covers 3:00 am to 12:00 noon EDT: three hours with New York and two with Chicago. Only the last two hours fall in the Philippine night-work window.

That window runs from 10 pm to 6 am, and the Labor Code sets a night shift differential of at least 10% for employees working in it (Article 86). Vietnam adds at least 30% for employee work between 22:00 and 06:00 (Labor Code 2019, Articles 98 and 106). Use shared hours for content sign-off and launch checks. We set the schedule before the offer, which is how our placements get 4-6 hours of daily overlap with US hours.

Web Developer Skills to Screen For

jQuery was used by 24.1% of professional developers in Stack Overflow's 2025 survey, more than Next.js at 21.5%, and WordPress by 12.4%. A web developer hired to run existing sites inherits that code, so the five areas below test maintenance as much as new work.

WordPress performance and page builders

The Web Almanac 2025 CMS chapter estimates that around 60% of WordPress sites use a page builder, and Elementor leads the builders it measured, at 43% on mobile. WordPress posted a median mobile Lighthouse performance score of 41, against 64 for Wix.

Give the candidate an Elementor landing page with a slow hero image and score what they change first: the image, the builder's CSS and JavaScript, or the hosting.

PHP and version upkeep

PHP 8.1 lost security support on 31 December 2025, and PHP 8.2 follows on 31 December 2026, per php.net's supported versions page. WordPress's requirements page recommends PHP 8.3 or greater, and warns that PHP 7.4, which WordPress still runs on, has reached end of life and may expose a site to security vulnerabilities. Ask the candidate to plan a PHP upgrade for a site with 30 plugins, including how they would find the plugins that break.

Third-party scripts and payment pages

In June 2024, Sansec reported that cdn.polyfill.io, embedded by more than 100,000 sites, was injecting malware on mobile devices after a Chinese company bought the domain and its GitHub account that February. PCI DSS Requirements 6.4.3 and 11.6.1 now require payment page scripts to be authorized, checked for integrity and monitored for tampering, per the PCI Security Standards Council. Hand the candidate a checkout template with six third-party tags and ask for the inventory, the Content Security Policy and the tags they would remove.

Accessibility that automated scans miss

The WebAIM Million 2026 counted 56.1 detectable errors per home page. Low-contrast text appeared on 83.9% of pages and missing image alt text on 53.1%. Home pages that used ARIA averaged 59.1 errors, against 42 for pages without it. Ask the candidate to fix a navigation menu built from div elements with role="menu", using a keyboard and a screen reader, not a browser extension alone.

Structured data and search features

Google limited FAQ rich results to well-known, authoritative government and health websites in August 2023. In June 2025 it began phasing out seven more structured data types, including Course Info, Estimated Salary and Vehicle Listing, and said the change would not affect how pages are ranked. Ask which markup still earns a search feature for your pages, and how they would check it in Search Console.

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. Custom themes, plugins and page templates a contractor writes for you stay theirs until transferred, and § 204(a) requires that transfer in writing, signed.

IRS Publication 515 says the place where services are performed determines the source of the income, so a developer working from Manila or Bangkok earns foreign-source income. A foreign individual gives the payer Form W-8BEN to certify foreign status.

Keep the accounts in the company's name as well as the code. The registrar, the hosting account, the CDN and the analytics property should belong to you, with the developer added as a user.

The developer's country then applies its own employment test. Philippine courts use the four-fold test, and in Atok Big Wedge v. Gison the Supreme Court named the power of control as the most important of the four. Under Article 13 of Vietnam's 2019 Labor Code, an agreement under another name counts as a labor contract when it covers a paid job, wages and one party's management and supervision.

A one-off site rebuild with a launch date suits a contractor agreement. A developer who runs your sites week to week, with admin access to hosting and payments, fits the employment tests above, and our Employer of Record service employs that developer in-country. Our Philippines EOR page covers the local contributions. This is a summary, not legal advice.

English Level and Working Norms

Vietnam is the only market in the table where IT workers score no higher than the national average on the EF English Proficiency Index 2025: both sit at 500. In the Philippines, Indonesia, China and Thailand the IT score is higher. The index ranks 123 countries and regions, with a global average of 488.

Scores come from EF's country pages, such as the Philippines, Vietnam and Thailand.

A web developer's English ends up on the page: button labels, form errors, alt text and the meta descriptions your US customers read in search results. Ask finalists to write the alt text and error messages for one of your forms, and have a US marketer review them.

Holidays affect launch dates. Thanksgiving on 26 November 2026 is a working day in Asia, so a developer there can watch a Black Friday landing page while your US team is off. Vietnam's Labor Code gives five paid days for Lunar New Year (Article 112), so a Vietnam-based developer should not own a site migration that week.

Web Developer Hiring Process

Second Talent's vetting covers stages 2 to 5 before you see a profile. For a single-stack brief, our WordPress developer and PHP developer tracks run the same stages.

Stage 1: Define what the hire owns List the sites, the CMS and PHP versions, the hosting, the payment pages in scope and the Core Web Vitals your pages fail today. A marketing-site maintainer and a headless commerce build need different tests.

Stage 2: Application review We look for live sites the candidate can name their part in, with before-and-after performance numbers, and for plugins or themes in a public repository. Template installs with no custom code do not pass.

Stage 3: Skills assessment The candidate takes a slow WordPress page with an inaccessible form and a third-party script tag, then fixes it on a staging copy. We score Core Web Vitals on a throttled mobile profile, keyboard access and the change log they write.

Stage 4: Live technical interview with a senior engineer A senior engineer walks through the assessment, then asks the candidate to plan a PHP 8.2 to 8.4 upgrade and to explain what Requirement 6.4.3 means for a checkout page.

Stage 5: Background and reference checks We ask former managers about launches that went wrong, how the candidate handled access to hosting and payment accounts, and whether sites stayed patched. You then choose the contractor or EOR route above.

Hire Web 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. Web developers start from $23 USD/hr (billed monthly), 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 sets out subscription, direct-hire and EOR pricing. Beyond Cars, a second-hand car marketplace, grew its engineering team in Taiwan by 50% within 4 months through us, and the Beyond Cars case study reports a 70% total increase before its acquisition by Carro.