This piece was written for enterprise technology leaders and originally published on the Wednesday Solutions mobile development blog . Wednesday is a mobile development staffing agency that helps US mid-market enterprises ship reliable iOS, Android, and cross-platform apps — with AI-augmented workflows built in. A $180,000 iOS engineer costs $270,000 to $310,000 fully loaded. A three-engineer iOS and Android team runs $800,000 to $1.1M per year before a line of code ships. Here is everything that does not appear in the original headcount request. $310,000. That is what a $180,000 iOS engineer actually costs a US mid-market enterprise in 2026 - fully loaded, with every cost that does not appear in the headcount request included. The $130,000 gap is not padding or rounding. It is recruiting fees, payroll taxes, benefits, onboarding time loss, device and license costs, training, and a share of management overhead that exists because someone has to run the team.…