Every engineering budget starts with a salary benchmark. That is the mistake.

The Engineering Capacity Benchmark 2026 runs the arithmetic most budgets skip. US federal data puts employer benefits at 46% on top of salary, before a laptop, a software seat, an AI licence, or a recruiter fee. Model a five-person US pod and the salaries total $911,944; the real first-year cash cost is $1,348,185. That is a 48% understatement. Worse, the multiplier is regressive. Juniors carry a higher loaded cost than staff engineers, at exactly the moment the junior market is thinning out.

The fix is not a better salary table. It is a different unit. An engineer is paid for 52 weeks and delivers roughly 45.8, and a first-year hire delivers fewer still, so this paper benchmarks fully loaded cost per productive engineering week instead: $6,775 in year one against $4,982 at steady state. Six sourced tables cover role, region, and seniority, with every assumption exposed and every modelled figure labelled as such. Rocketeams is built around the same denominator: pre-vetted engineers, profiles in 48 to 72 hours, embedded delivery governance, a two-week trial. Run your own numbers before you approve next year’s engineering headcount.