"A PR person costs $110,000 and an agency costs $6,000 a month, so the agency is cheaper." That comparison is wrong in both directions, and it is how most companies end up with the wrong model for two years.
Here is the actual math, and the part of the decision that is not about money at all.
The fully-loaded cost of a PR hire
Salary is roughly 70% of what an employee costs. Run the real numbers for a mid-level communications manager in a U.S. metro:
- Base salary: $95,000–$130,000. A senior PR manager with real media relationships runs $130,000–$180,000. A director of communications runs $170,000–$230,000.
- Payroll taxes: about 8% of base.
- Benefits and insurance: $12,000–$22,000.
- Equity: real dilution, often ignored in this comparison.
- Tooling: a media database is $5,000–$15,000/year, monitoring another $3,000–$12,000, wire distribution on top.
- Recruiting: 15–20% of first-year salary if you use a recruiter, or 60–100 hours of internal time if you do not.
- Ramp: three to four months before a new hire is productive, during which you pay full freight.
- Risk: if it does not work out, you have spent six months and a severance.
Fully loaded, a mid-level PR hire costs $135,000–$170,000/year, or about $11,000–$14,000 a month. A senior one runs $200,000–$260,000, or $17,000–$22,000 a month.
Compare that to agency pricing: $3,000–$8,000/month at a boutique, $8,000–$20,000 mid-size. The full ranges are in our PR cost guide.
The comparison nobody makes correctly
The naive read is that the agency is cheaper. The correct read is about hours.
A $6,000/month retainer buys roughly 15–25 hours of blended agency labor. Your in-house hire gives you about 160 hours a month. Per hour, in-house is dramatically cheaper, roughly $70–$90 fully loaded for a mid-level hire versus $200–$300 blended at an agency.
So the real question is not "which is cheaper." It is: do you have 160 hours a month of PR work?
For most companies under about $20M in revenue, the honest answer is no. You have 20–40 hours of media relations work and 120 hours of something else, which is why in-house PR hires at small companies end up writing blog posts, running the newsletter, and managing swag. That is not a failure of the hire. It is a failure of the scoping.
What each model genuinely does better
Agencies do better:
- Relationships at scale. An agency team has 5–15 people's worth of reporter contacts. One hire has one person's.
- Surge capacity. Launch weeks, crises, and conference cycles need more than one person for short bursts.
- Range. Analyst relations, awards, crisis, executive positioning. One hire is rarely good at all of these.
- Pattern recognition. An agency has run your play for eleven other companies. That is worth a lot in months one through six.
- Firing them is easy. A 30-day notice versus a performance-management process.
In-house does better:
- Speed. An internal person hears the customer win on Slack the day it happens. An agency hears about it on the Thursday call, two weeks late. This is the single biggest real-world difference.
- Context. They know the product, the roadmap, and which executive is actually good on a call.
- Executive access. They can grab your CEO in a hallway. Your agency cannot.
- Institutional memory. Everything an agency learns leaves when you cancel.
- Cost per hour, at volume. If you genuinely have full-time work, in-house wins on economics and it is not close.
The thing agencies do worst is reacting fast to news that came from inside the company. The thing in-house does worst is having enough hands and contacts on the day it matters.
The hybrid model most companies actually land on
The structure that works for most companies between Series B and $100M revenue:
One in-house communications lead ($130,000–$180,000) plus a small agency retainer ($4,000–$8,000/month).
The in-house person owns strategy, internal wrangling, executive prep, approvals, and the company's fastest-moving news. The agency provides media relationships, surge hands, and specialist work such as awards, analyst days, and a launch push. Total cost lands around $220,000–$280,000/year, which is roughly what companies at that stage spend anyway, but with far better utilization.
The failure mode to avoid: hiring in-house and keeping a full-size agency retainer doing the same job. That is where six-figure waste lives. When you bring someone in-house, cut the agency scope to the things your hire cannot do alone, and put it in writing.
The other viable hybrid at smaller scale: a senior freelancer at 15–20 hours a month ($2,500–$5,000) instead of an agency, paired with a founder who does the actual talking. For seed-stage companies this beats both alternatives most of the time. Our agency vs. DIY comparison goes deeper on that end of the spectrum.
When to switch
Stay with founder-led plus distribution if you are pre-Series A, have news a few times a year, and your founder is a decent writer. Spend on distribution and your own outreach, not on headcount.
Hire an agency or freelancer first when you have a real news cadence, roughly one substantive thing a month, but not a full-time workload. This is most companies from seed through Series B.
Make the first in-house hire when two of these are true:
- You have more than 20 hours a month of PR work that only someone internal can do.
- Your agency is slow to your own news, and the delay is costing you.
- You are spending more than $10,000/month on agency fees.
- You have continuous reputation exposure, such as a regulated category, a consumer brand, or a public company runway.
- Executives need weekly prep, not monthly.
Build a team (2–4 people) past roughly $75–100M revenue, or earlier if you are pre-IPO, multi-market, or in a category where reporters call you weekly.
The sequence that goes wrong most often is hiring in-house too early, at seed or Series A, because a retainer felt expensive. You end up with a $140,000 person doing $30,000 of PR work and $110,000 of miscellaneous marketing, and no media relationships either, because one junior person cannot build them fast. If you are unsure where you sit, when to hire a PR agency walks the stage question in more detail.
Bottom line
Compare hours, not invoices. Agencies are expensive per hour and cheap per month, and hires are the reverse. Buy the agency when your PR work is lumpy and relationship-dependent, buy the hire when it is continuous and context-dependent, and expect to end up running both.
Want to see what the distribution half costs before you decide? [Our pricing is public](/pricing).