Nearshore vs offshore vs onshore: what each costs you

Three words, measured in hours

The difference between nearshore and offshore is the working day you share, not the distance on a map. Onshore means a team in your own country. Nearshore means a team close enough to share most of your office hours, usually one or two time zones away, often under the same or a compatible legal system. Offshore means a team on another continent, where the overlap with your day is a few hours or none, in exchange for the lowest rates.

Which country counts as which depends on where you sit. For a buyer in London, Belgium and Poland are nearshore and India is offshore. For a buyer in New York, Mexico and Colombia are nearshore and Belgium is offshore by distance, with two shared office hours. The terms are explained in nearshoring; the hours for any pair of cities are in our time zone overlap calculator.

Rates per model

The freelance platform Arc published hourly rates for freelance developers in May 2026, from a survey of 5,302 freelancers that it calls directional:

For a buyer in the US, Latin America at 35 to 75 dollars is the usual nearshore, against 95 to 150 dollars onshore. Labour cost per hour in IT, from Eurostat, tells the same story inside Europe: 58.70 euros in Belgium against 26.30 in Poland in 2024. Country by country figures are in developer rates by country.

The costs a rate leaves out

A lower rate is a real saving only if the hours stay the same. Four costs grow with distance:

The weight of each depends on the work. A stable product with a strong product owner and a written backlog runs well offshore, and the savings are large. A first version of a platform that has to apply your business rules runs better close by, because most of the work is talking.

Law and data: often the deciding factor

For an EU company, a nearshore team inside the EU means no data transfer at all under the GDPR: the data stays in the Union. A UK company has the same with the EU, thanks to the adequacy decision renewed until 27 December 2031. An offshore team in a country without an adequacy decision needs standard contractual clauses and a transfer impact assessment for any personal data it touches, and your customers may ask about it in every security questionnaire.

Intellectual property follows the contract everywhere, but enforcing it is simpler where you share a legal system or a treaty. Write the assignment of all IP into the contract, wherever the team is.

A worked comparison for a buyer in Amsterdam

A logistics company in Amsterdam needs a first version of a planning platform, estimated by both bidders at 1,500 hours.

• Offshore team in India,at 35 dollars an hour: 52,500 dollars. Shared office hours: 3.5 to 4.5. The company's operations manager spends a day a week writing specifications and testing. Two rounds of rework on the planning rules add 300 hours.
• Nearshore team in Belgium,at a fixed price per module: compare that price with the 52,500 dollars plus the 300 extra hours and a day a week of the operations manager's time for six months. Shared office hours: 8. Workshops at the client's office, two and a half hours by train from Ghent.

The offshore option is cheaper unless the extra hours and the internal time outweigh the difference. For a well-specified product it usually is; for a platform full of business rules it often is not.

Mixed models

Many companies end up with a mix rather than a choice:

• A nearshore lead, an offshore teamA small team close by writes the specifications, owns the architecture and reviews the code; a larger offshore team builds. It works when the nearshore lead has real authority and enough hours to review.
• Follow the sunWork hands over at the end of one day to a team that starts its day: support desks and operations use it well; product development rarely, because every handover loses context.
• Onshore for the discovery, offshore for the buildThe first weeks, when the business is translated into a plan, happen close by; the defined build goes where the rate is lowest. It works when the plan is detailed enough to survive the handover.
• Nearshore for the core, a package for the restThe software that sets you apart is built by a team that understands it; standard functions come from a subscription.

Whichever you choose, put the repository in your own organisation from the first commit, so moving work between teams never depends on one supplier.

Questions to ask any remote supplier

Wherever the team sits, ask the same things: which hours they will be reachable in your time zone, who writes the specifications, who reviews the code, where the repository and the data live, and what happens when a key developer leaves. The answers show quickly whether the model fits your project, more than the country on the invoice does.

What we offer as a nearshore team

We are a team in Ghent: nearshore for the UK, the Netherlands, Germany and France, offshore by distance for the US with two shared hours. We do not compete on the hourly rate; Belgium is among the most expensive countries in Europe for labour. We take on projects where understanding the business is the hard part, with a fixed price per module and a demo every two weeks. That is how we built the platform DA Logistics runs on every day, with fuel stock under Belgian excise rules and a driver app in three languages. See nearshore software development and custom software development, or book a call.