Offshore software development in Pakistan: rates, time zones and risks

The short answer

Buyers come to Pakistan for three reasons: price, English and the hours. A senior engineer from a good Lahore, Karachi or Islamabad firm costs a third to half of a US or UK agency engineer. Work runs in English. And the day overlaps well with London and Berlin.

There are real downsides. Quality varies a lot between firms. Power and internet need backup plans. Overlap with California is thin. If you need someone in your office every week, hire locally.

Pakistan is a good fit if

• You are a UK or European company that wants live overlap for most of the working day.
• You need senior engineers for AI, web or SaaS work and can't justify $120 or more an hour.
• You are on the US East Coast and are fine with a 4–5 hour overlap plus written handoffs.
• You will write clear acceptance criteria and review the work every week.

It is a poor fit if

• You need full-day overlap with the US West Coast.
• A regulator or customer contract bans any offshore access to data. Check first, though: for EU and UK data the answer is often yes with the right setup, as our GDPR guide explains.
• You are choosing on lowest price. That is how most bad offshore stories start.

How much does a developer in Pakistan cost?

People mix up two numbers: what a developer earns, and what a firm bills you. Both matter, for different reasons.

Salaries in Pakistan

Salary data is noisy. Job sites skew junior, and Levels.fyi skews toward the best-paying companies. Read the table as a range, not a price list. Our guide to developer rates in Pakistan compares more sources, by role and seniority.

What firms bill

The pattern is clear even with noisy data. South Asian agency rates sit well below US, UK and Western European rates, and below most Polish firms. Pakistan and India price in the same band.

Our own rates are $35 an hour for a mid-level engineer and $45 for a senior. Full-time, that is about $5,600–$7,200 a month. For pay and rates by role, from Next.js to LLM engineers, see our guide to developer rates in Pakistan.

Why the bill is higher than the salary

A $5,600 monthly bill against a senior salary of roughly $720–$1,600 looks like a fat margin. It pays for things you would otherwise do yourself:

• Employer costs, paid leave and hardware.
• Backup power, two internet links and an office.
• Code review, QA and a lead who owns delivery.
• Hiring and replacing people, so you are not stuck when someone resigns.
• Taxes, accounting and the firm's profit.

Hiring a freelancer directly costs less. You then carry all of that risk yourself. If someone quotes $12 an hour for a senior engineer, ask who will actually write the code.

Project budgets

What time zone overlap do Pakistani teams have?

Pakistan runs on Pakistan Standard Time, UTC+5, all year. There is no daylight saving.

So the gap to your city shifts by an hour when you change your clocks. London is 5 hours behind in winter and 4 in summer.

Firms that sell to the UK and Europe usually work a shifted day, roughly 11:00 to 20:00. For US East Coast clients, a late shift to 23:00 gives 4–5 hours of overlap.

Ask how the firm staffs late shifts and for how long. People burn out on permanent night work, and tired engineers ship bugs.

For the US West Coast, plan for async work. Written handoffs at the end of your day, a short call early in your morning, and decisions recorded in the ticket.

Talent, scale and what Pakistani teams do well

Pakistan's IT and IT-enabled services exports hit a record $4.6 billion in fiscal year 2025–26 (July to June). That is up about 21% from $3.81 billion the year before, according to State Bank of Pakistan figures.

Over 20,700 IT and ITeS companies were registered with the Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) as of 2025. Registration cuts the tax on export income to 0.25%, against 1% for unregistered firms. Most serious exporters register, so ask for the certificate.

Urdu is the national language, and Article 251 of the constitution allows English for official purposes. Business, contracts and technical work largely run in English.

The talent pool is big but uneven. Accredited universities turn out around 75,000 IT graduates a year. A government document reported in 2025 said fewer than 10% were employable by export-focused firms. Good engineers exist, but you have to filter hard.

In our experience, the strongest Pakistani teams work in full-stack TypeScript (React, Next.js, Node), Python back ends, mobile apps, and more recently LLM and RAG systems. Niche areas such as embedded systems or old enterprise platforms are thinner. Ask for shipped work in your stack, not a skills list.

The risks, and how good firms handle them

Here is the honest list. Each one is manageable, but only if you ask about it before you sign.

Power and internet

Scheduled power cuts, called load-shedding, still happen, and evening cuts returned in April 2026. Internet is the bigger risk. Industry sources counted 68 outages in 2025, about 900 hours in total, from regulatory slowdowns and submarine cable faults. One slowdown in March 2025 ran for about 13 days.

Good firms run on backup power, keep two internet providers on different networks, and give engineers mobile data as a third fallback. Ask what happened to their delivery during the last big outage.

Uneven quality

The gap between the best and worst firms is wide. Start with a paid discovery sprint or a 2–4 week pilot before a long contract.

Key-person risk

Small firms lean on a few people. Ask who is on your project, who backs them up, and what happens if one leaves. Insist on documentation and full code access from day one.

Data and security

The real question is where your data lives and who can reach it. Have the team work in your own cloud accounts and repositories, with access you can revoke. EU and UK buyers have extra steps, covered in our guide to GDPR-compliant offshore development.

Currency

The rupee has been fairly stable in 2026, between about 276 and 283 to the dollar. It has a history of sharp falls, though. Price your contract in your own currency and the risk sits with the vendor.

How contracts, payments and IP work

Contracts and jurisdiction

Put the contract under your own law, for example England and Wales, a US state or an EU member state. A serious firm will agree.

If you prefer arbitration, Pakistan gave effect to the New York Convention through the Recognition and Enforcement (Arbitration Agreements and Foreign Arbitral Awards) Act 2011. That is the legal basis for enforcing foreign arbitral awards there. This is practical guidance, not legal advice, so have your own lawyer review the contract.

Paying a Pakistani firm

Most firms invoice in US dollars, pounds or euros. The common routes:

• Bank wire to the firm's Pakistani bank account. Standard for company-to-company work. Expect a few days and fees on both ends.
• Payoneer, which lets Pakistani businesses invoice clients abroad and withdraw to a local bank.
• Wise, from your side only. Residents of Pakistan can't open Wise accounts, but you can send from your Wise account to a Pakistani bank account.

Pay against milestones or monthly timesheets, not big upfront sums. A first milestone or a couple of weeks in advance is reasonable. Six months in advance is not.

Intellectual property

The contract should assign all IP in the work to you. It should list every open-source component and its license, and bar the vendor from reusing other clients' code in your product.

The simplest protection is practical. Keep the repository in your own GitHub or GitLab organization from the first commit. Then IP assignment is paperwork, not a fight.

Fixed price, time and materials, or a dedicated team

Many buyers start with a fixed-price discovery sprint, then move to a dedicated team once trust is built. Here is how we run dedicated development teams.

How to evaluate a Pakistani development partner

Ask these on the first call. A good firm answers fast, and in writing.

1. Who exactly will work on my project? Can I interview them?
2. Can you show shipped work in my stack, with a reference I can call?
3. Will the code live in my repository, and the system in my cloud account, from day one?
4. Who owns the IP, and when does it pass to me?
5. Will you sign the contract under my law?
6. Are you registered with PSEB? Can I see the certificate?
7. What backup power and internet do you run? What happened in the last outage?
8. What hours will the team work, and how much overlap will I get?
9. How do you handle code review, automated tests and a staging environment?
10. If a key engineer leaves, how fast do you replace them, and who pays for the ramp-up?
11. For EU or UK personal data: will you sign a DPA and Standard Contractual Clauses?
12. What do I get at handover: docs, runbooks, credentials?

Red flags: a price far below everyone else, no named engineers, code kept in the vendor's own accounts, and pushback on signing under your law.

How we work at Sysvoy

We are a software studio in Lahore. Our founder and CEO, Muhammad Jawad Akram, has been building software for about 12 years. We build AI agents, LLM and RAG systems, and SaaS products for buyers in the US, UK and Europe.

• NDA before you share any detail.
• Work happens in your cloud accounts and repositories from day one. Access is least-privilege and revoked at handover.
• Your data is never used to train models. For sensitive data we deploy self-hosted models, so nothing goes to a third-party API.
• You own 100% of the IP, assigned in the contract. We list every open-source component and its license.
• Automated tests and a staging environment for acceptance.
• Handover includes architecture docs, runbooks and rotated credentials.
• Fixed-price milestones, or hourly with weekly timesheets.

Some recent work. We moved a Canadian registry business off an AI app builder onto Supabase and Vercel, with all data kept in Canada (case). We built an AI shopping assistant for a US B2B distributor that runs on open-weight models on their own servers (case). And we delivered a multi-agent AI security platform for a European cybersecurity company in fixed-price phases (case).

If you want engineers rather than a whole project, see how to hire developers in Pakistan through us. If you are weighing Pakistan for your next build, book a call. If we are the wrong fit, we will say so.