Your engineering lead wants someone to own the documentation. Marketing wants two technical articles a month. Both requests have landed in the same budget line: hire a technical writer.
You can fill that line and still leave one team disappointed. A person maintaining API documentation has a different assignment from a writer producing buyer-facing articles, even when both need to understand the same product. Comparing an employee's annual compensation with a price per blog post makes the cheaper option obvious. It also compares different work.
Start with the responsibility you need covered. Then compare people and proposals against that responsibility, using a cost model that includes your own team's time. The useful hiring question is who will own the work after the first draft arrives.
Before you hire a technical writer, separate the two jobs
For product documentation, the deliverable might be an installation guide, API reference, troubleshooting article or migration procedure. The reader needs to complete a task correctly. Someone must establish what the product does, test the instructions and keep the material current as the product changes.
That scope fits the Bureau of Labor Statistics description of technical writing, which includes determining users' needs, working with technical staff, selecting appropriate formats and revising material as necessary. Drafting is one part of the occupation.
Technical marketing content has a different immediate purpose: help a prospective buyer understand a problem, assess an approach or evaluate a product. It still needs accurate explanations and qualified claims. Its brief also needs a target reader, an editorial angle and a reason to exist in the buying process.
One writer can work across both. Make that an explicit requirement, supported by relevant samples, rather than assuming the word "technical" settles it.
I would write two short scopes before requesting prices. For documentation: which product surfaces, which users, what update cadence, and who approves technical correctness? For marketing: which audience, which questions, which formats, and what source access will the writer receive? If both scopes are substantial, budget for both. A job title is not extra capacity.
What it costs to hire a technical writer in the US
The BLS May 2025 wage data puts the US technical-writer median at $90,390 a year. The lowest-paid 10% earned less than $57,440; the highest-paid 10% earned more than $145,270. These are occupation-wide employee wages, not a quote for your vacancy or freelance rates.
Another useful reference answers a different question. The Write the Docs 2025 salary survey reports a $125,000 median among 370 US full-time respondents, with a middle-half range of $95,000 to $166,862. It is a voluntary community survey. Its compensation question also allows significant bonus, equity or commission to be included, so that median should not be relabelled as base salary.
Use those figures to challenge an assumption, not to generate an offer automatically. Ask your recruiter or hiring manager for a local range matched to seniority, product complexity and responsibilities. An experienced first documentation hire who must establish the function is a different search from a writer joining an established team with an editor and a working publishing system.
Outside the US, rebuild this comparison using local compensation data and employer costs. Currency conversion alone does not turn a US hiring budget into a UK, European or South African one.
Salary is only one line in the employee budget
In June 2026 BLS compensation data, private-industry employers averaged $46.89 in total compensation for every $32.82 in wages and salaries per hour worked. That gives useful context for the costs beyond wages. It is not an annual-salary multiplier: the BLS benefit categories include paid leave, which an annual salary budget may already cover.
Build the budget from separate cost lines instead. For a hypothetical first year, assume $100,000 in salary, $25,000 in additional employer-paid benefits and taxes, $5,000 for recruitment, and $3,000 for equipment and software. The total is $133,000 before other company-specific overhead. Every input is an assumption, not a market benchmark. Replace them with your own figures.
Keep the categories mutually exclusive. In this example, salary includes pay during leave, so the additional benefits line excludes that same payment. Have finance reconcile the categories to your payroll and benefits budget. A spreadsheet can double-count with extraordinary confidence.
Have finance check the categories: salary, employer-paid benefits and taxes, recruiting, tools, and any allocation for management or specialist review. Some sit in different departmental budgets. They still belong in the decision.
Compare four routes against the work they will own
A permanent employee makes sense when you need continuing ownership: priorities, information architecture, release updates, review relationships and maintenance. A contractor can take on substantial documentation work too, but the agreement must define availability, access, handover and who owns updates outside the engagement.
A documentation consultancy may provide several capabilities together, such as content design, migration and implementation. A technical content service may instead provide researched marketing articles. Neither label tells you enough to compare proposals. Ask what is included.
| Route | A useful fit to evaluate | Put this in the scope |
|---|---|---|
| Employee | A continuing documentation function | Ownership, maintenance, review authority and priorities |
| Freelance technical writer | A bounded project or agreed ongoing capacity | Deliverables, hours or milestones, access and handover |
| Documentation consultancy | Work requiring a team or several documentation skills | Named roles, implementation responsibilities and support |
| Technical marketing service | Buyer-facing articles, explainers or case studies | Research, expert interviews, verification, editing and revisions |
For rate context, the Write the Docs 2025 survey reports a $60 median hourly contractor rate among 47 North American respondents. That small, self-selected group is a reference point, not a ceiling or an agency rate card.
For a clearly different service, Draft.dev's content-production page advertises plans starting at $9,000 a month with an initial three-month minimum. That is one provider's offer for technical content production. It is not the going rate for maintaining your product documentation.
Request proposals against the same brief. If one includes interviews, technical testing and revisions while another includes writing from supplied notes, ask for the missing work to be priced before declaring a winner. Also identify what happens when an expert is unavailable or the product changes halfway through the assignment.
Build a comparison that survives a finance meeting
Consider a hypothetical documentation project needing 400 contractor hours at an assumed $100 an hour. The fee is $40,000. If your engineers spend another 40 hours reviewing at an internal planning cost of $100 an hour, add $4,000. An assumed $2,000 in tools brings the project estimate to $46,000.
That number covers a defined project. The $133,000 employee example covers a year and a different commitment. To compare them, estimate the full year's documentation workload, including maintenance, and ask what each route covers. Do not divide an employee's cost by a blog-post rate and call the result a hiring threshold.
For marketing production, build a separate model using the number and type of pieces, the quoted fee, your briefing time and expert review. If an employee would split time between marketing and documentation, show that allocation and the duties left uncovered. Avoid pretending their entire cost belongs to whichever comparison you want to win.
Use a low and high workload estimate as well. In the contractor example, 300 to 600 hours at the same assumed rate changes the fee from $30,000 to $60,000 before review and tools. The uncertainty matters more than a beautifully formatted single number.
This is also where availability belongs. Record whether a proposal buys scheduled capacity, a delivery date or merely access to someone who may be free. Ask an employee candidate what support they would need to meet the same timetable. You are buying a workable arrangement, not just hours.
Give the writer access before expecting output
In Mintlify's interviews with four experienced first documentation hires, the problems included fragmented material, unclear ownership and missing review processes. One account described support creating parallel documentation to fill gaps. These are practitioner accounts, not a survey establishing how often this happens.
They are still useful hiring preparation. Before the person starts, assign an internal sponsor who can resolve priorities. Arrange access to a safe product environment and the relevant source material. Name a reviewer for each subject area and agree a realistic response time. If approvals depend on one engineer, account for that engineer's availability in the delivery plan.
Make the first assignment small enough to reveal how the system works. A single end-to-end setup guide can expose missing permissions, contradictory sources and an unclear review path before those problems spread across a larger project.
Do not promise a writer that they can simply "pull the knowledge out of the team" while giving them no route to the team. Put the interviews on calendars. Give someone authority to answer unresolved questions. Access is part of the brief.
Test candidates on the work, including what they question
For a documentation hire, ask candidates to walk through a relevant sample. What did they personally own? How did they test it? Which decisions required an engineer? What happened when a release changed the instructions? A polished page tells you less about those responsibilities than the discussion around it.
My preferred next step is a small paid exercise with the same sanitized materials for every candidate. Provide a short product description, a safe test environment if available, and a deliberately incomplete brief. Ask for a short procedure and a list of questions they would resolve before publication. Explain that unresolved questions are welcome; this is not a guessing contest.
Assess the sequence of steps, stated prerequisites, handling of missing information and technical accuracy. Agree the evaluation criteria beforehand. For a role involving code examples, have a qualified reviewer check that the example works in the stated environment.
For a marketing writer, use a different task: a brief explanation for a named buyer, with sources attached and a clear boundary between documented facts and interpretation. Evaluate whether the candidate can make the subject understandable without removing the conditions that make the explanation true.
State your AI-use policy for the exercise and the eventual job. If AI assistance is allowed, ask the candidate to explain what they checked and how. An account of the process gives you something to evaluate beyond a fluent paragraph.
Write the first assignment into the hiring decision
Before approving either a job requisition or a contract, put the first month's work on one page. Name the reader, the material to produce, the sources available, the reviewer and the acceptance test. Include what will happen to the material after delivery.
For documentation, that test might be whether someone unfamiliar with the setup can complete it in the stated environment without an undocumented step. For a marketing article, it might be whether the intended buyer gets a defensible answer and every material claim survives a source check. Use the test appropriate to the work.
If nobody can describe that first assignment, commission a scoped discovery or documentation audit before committing to a larger engagement. You may need help defining the function as well as writing the material. Say so in the brief and pay for that work explicitly.
Then make the decision against the responsibility you can actually hand over. The first successful hire starts with an answer to a very ordinary question: when the writer needs a decision on Tuesday, who will give them one?