What AI help costs: consultant hours, build teams and hires, priced with BLS wage data

AI help costs an hourly rate for advice, a monthly fee for a build team, or a salary plus benefits for a hire; for scale, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) puts the May 2025 median wage for a U.S. software developer at $135,980 a year, and in private-industry management and professional jobs, benefits add about 46 cents to each wage dollar (June 2026).

The honest way to price your own case is to put real numbers on all three options: a published rate, a published retainer, and what BLS says comparable employees earn. Then add up the hours the work takes you today.

This guide does that. It uses one company’s public prices, BLS wage data for May 2025, and a worksheet you can fill in with your own numbers. It does not quote a “typical” AI consultant rate. We found no government series that reports what AI consultants bill by the hour, and a number without a source is not worth putting in your budget.

The three ways AI help is priced

How it’s priced	What you’re buying	What you should get at the end
By the hour (consultant, advisor)	Expert judgment on a decision: what to build, what to buy, what to stop	A written decision, a plan, and the skills to act on it
By the month (build team, retainer, agency)	People who build and run systems for you, continuously	Working systems, documentation, and someone to call when they break
By salary (an employee)	A person inside the company, full time	Skills that stay in the building, as long as the person does

Two more costs sit under all three: the software and model usage the systems run on, and your own time. Model prices move fast, so treat them as a line to check each quarter, not a fixed number. We covered one week of that in The price of intelligence fell twice in two days.

What comparable employees earn: BLS wage data, May 2025

If you hired instead of buying help, these are the roles you would most likely look at. The figures are medians, meaning half of workers in the role earn more and half earn less. They come from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey for May 2025, published May 15, 2026, and shown in the Occupational Outlook Handbook pages last modified August 27, 2026.

Role (BLS occupation)	Median annual wage	Median hourly wage	U.S. employment
Software developers	$135,980	$65.38	1,687,890
Data scientists	$120,230	$57.80	262,440
Management analysts	$101,860	$48.97	898,280
Computer and information systems managers	$175,140	$84.20	670,570

Source: BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025. Employment counts and the software developer hourly median are from the same series through the BLS public data API, retrieved September 24, 2026.

Why these four. Software developers and data scientists build the systems. Management analysts, in BLS’s words, are “often called management consultants.” Computer and information systems managers run technology inside a company. BLS notes that self-employed analysts are paid by their clients, typically by the hour or by the project.

These are national medians. Pay varies by region, industry and seniority. The BLS pages show those splits if you need them.

A salary is not the cost of a hire

A wage is only part of what an employee costs. BLS measures the rest in its Employer Costs for Employee Compensation survey.

For private-industry workers in management, professional and related occupations, BLS reported for June 2026 (released September 9, 2026):

• Total compensation averaged $78.88 per hour worked.
• Wages and salaries were $54.06, or 68.5% of the total.
• Benefits were $24.82, or 31.5% of the total.

Put another way, benefits added about 46 cents for each dollar of wages in that group.

Here is what that ratio does to the medians above. This is an illustration, not a BLS figure for any single role: it applies the group average to each occupation.

Role	Median wage	Wage plus benefits at the group ratio	Per month
Software developer	$135,980	about $198,400	about $16,500
Data scientist	$120,230	about $175,400	about $14,600
Management analyst	$101,860	about $148,600	about $12,400
Computer and information systems manager	$175,140	about $255,600	about $21,300

Still missing from that line: recruiting, equipment, software seats, management time, the months before a new hire is productive, and the cost of a hire who does not work out. Those vary too much by company to average. Put your own figures in the worksheet below.

Hourly advice versus an hourly wage

A consultant’s hourly rate and an employee’s hourly wage are not the same kind of number. The rate has to cover the consultant’s unbilled hours, their benefits, their tools and their business. The wage covers only time worked.

So compare what each one gets done, not the number itself. One published price for scale: Business of One’s Consult is $400 an hour, booked in 5-hour blocks, so the smallest booking is $2,000. At the BLS medians, $2,000 buys about 41 hours of a management analyst’s wage or about 31 hours of a software developer’s wage, before benefits.

That is the wrong question on its own, though. The right one is: what will I decide or build in those five hours, and what would it take to reach the same place alone? If a block settles a decision you would otherwise spend a month circling, the hours were cheap. If it produces a slide deck you never use, they were not.

A monthly team versus one hire

The same logic applies to monthly help. Business of One’s Build is $15,000 a month, or $180,000 a year, for build-with-you coaches who build your AI systems with you and teach your team to run them, with a shared 24/7 on-call rotation.

For scale, that is about 1.3 times the median software developer wage, and a little below the illustrative $198,400 for that wage plus benefits. The comparison has limits both ways:

• One hire is one set of skills, about 40 hours a week, with vacations and sick days. The skills stay in the company as long as the person does.
• A team on retainer is several skills and round-the-clock coverage, but the skills live with the vendor unless the contract makes teaching part of the job.

Neither is cheaper in every case. The worksheet helps you see which one is cheaper for your case.

The cost worksheet

Copy this into a spreadsheet or onto paper. Fill in the blanks with your own numbers. The BLS lines give you a starting point where you have none.

Part 1: What the work costs you today

Line	Item	How to fill it in	Your number
A	Hours per week the work takes now	Count every person who touches it, including you	____
B	Loaded hourly cost of those people	Their wage × 1.46 (the BLS group ratio above), or your payroll figure	$____
C	Yearly cost of the work today	A × B × 52	$____
D	Cost of errors, delays or lost sales	Your estimate; write down how you got it	$____
E	Total yearly cost today	C + D	$____

Part 2: What each option costs for a year

Line	Item	How to fill it in	Your number
F	Advice	Hours needed × hourly rate	$____
G	Build team or agency	Monthly fee × months	$____
H	A hire	Salary × 1.46, plus recruiting and equipment	$____
I	Software and model usage	Current invoices or quotes, per month × 12	$____
J	Your own time	Hours you will spend × what your hour is worth	$____
K	Cost of the option you chose	The relevant line from F, G or H, plus I + J	$____

Part 3: Does it pay?

Line	Item	How to fill it in	Your number
L	Share of today’s cost you expect to remove	Be conservative; 0% to 100%	____%
M	Yearly saving	E × L	$____
N	Net in year one	M − K	$____
O	Months to break even	K ÷ (M ÷ 12)	____

A worked line using BLS figures only: work that takes 20 hours a week of a management analyst at the median wage costs 20 × $48.97 × 52, or about $50,900 a year in wages. With benefits at the group ratio it is about $74,300. That is line C for that case. Everything after it depends on your business, which is why the worksheet has blanks.

Three rules for filling it in:

1. Write down where each number came from. A payroll report, an invoice, a BLS page. If you guessed, say so.
2. Line L is the one people inflate. Put in the share you would bet on, not the share a sales page promises.
3. Run it again when something changes. Model prices, wages and your own volume all move.

Costs people leave off

• Your time. Every option needs the owner to decide what the work is and to check the result. Budget hours, not just dollars.
• Cleaning up data. Systems built on messy records produce messy results. Someone has to fix the records first.
• Keeping it running. Models, tools and vendor terms change. Somebody has to notice and adjust. See Rent the harness, keep the judgment for what you can rent and what stays with you.
• Getting out. If you stop paying a vendor, what do you keep? Code, prompts, documentation, accounts? Price the exit before you sign.

Choosing between them

Cost is one input. The other is what kind of help the work needs. The companion guide Consultant, agency, build team or hire? has a decision table and 20 questions to ask any vendor before you sign. For how many businesses are paying for any of this, see Small business AI adoption data.

This guide is for education. It is not tax, accounting or employment advice. Talk to your accountant about how any of these costs are treated for your business.

If the worksheet points to paying by the hour, a Consult block is one way to get it: $400 an hour in 5-hour blocks with our build-with-you coaches, and you leave with the plan and the skills to carry it out.