Hire PHP Developers

Ideaware places senior PHP developers from Latin America on US engineering teams, most of them Laravel specialists. You see vetted candidates within 48 hours, your pick starts 8–12 days after the first call, and they work US business hours. A senior PHP developer costs $4,500–7,500 a month, with payroll, benefits and equipment included.

PHP still runs a large share of the web. In the 2025 Stack Overflow Developer Survey, 18.9% of respondents used PHP and 8.9% used Laravel. The hard part of hiring is the spread in quality: a developer who wrote WordPress plugins in PHP 5 and one who ships typed Laravel services with queues and tests both call themselves PHP developers.

What a PHP developer costs in the US

A US PHP developer earns $87,042 a year on average, with most salaries between $55,136 and $137,411, according to Indeed (updated September 2026). The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a $92,650 median for web developers (May 2025).

Benefits add 30% to employer compensation costs in US private industry (BLS, June 2026), before any recruiter fee.

PHP is one of the cheaper US roles, so compare against a senior salary at the top of that range, not the average. The developer cost guide shows the comparison for each role; across roles, most teams save 40–60%.

The PHP stack our developers work in

Our PHP developers write PHP 8.2 or later with strict types, enums and readonly properties, and most work in Laravel. Typical stack:

• Frameworks: Laravel (primary), Symfony for enterprise codebases, Slim for small services
• Laravel ecosystem: Eloquent, queues with Horizon, Octane, Nova or Filament admin panels, Sanctum and Passport auth
• Frontend pairing: Livewire, Inertia.js with Vue or React, Blade with Alpine.js, Tailwind CSS
• Data: MySQL or MariaDB, PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch or Meilisearch
• Quality: PHPUnit or Pest, PHPStan or Larastan, Laravel Pint
• Delivery: Docker, GitHub Actions, Laravel Forge or Vapor, AWS

How we vet PHP developers

We accept about 3% of applicants. PHP candidates go through five steps: an async technical assessment, a 90-minute live coding session, an architecture review of a past project, an English and communication interview, and reference checks with former managers.

The PHP rounds test modern practice:

• Eloquent performance: spotting N+1 queries, eager loading, chunking large tables
• Queues: retries, failed jobs and idempotent handlers for payments or webhooks
• Types and static analysis: strict types and a clean PHPStan run at a meaningful level
• API design: resources, validation with form requests, versioning and rate limits
• Legacy upgrades: moving code from PHP 7 to 8 and upgrading Laravel across major versions
• Testing: feature tests with Pest or PHPUnit, database factories and fakes for external services

You interview the finalists yourself, and we can arrange a paired session on your repo.

Laravel, WordPress or another backend: which hire do you need?

Hire a PHP developer for a Laravel or Symfony application, or for a custom PHP codebase that needs upgrading. Other cases:

• A WordPress or WooCommerce site: ask for a WordPress specialist. Hooks, Gutenberg blocks and WooCommerce extensions are their own discipline.
• A new backend with no PHP history: compare Node.js developers and Python developers on the backend developers overview.
• Laravel plus a heavy Vue or React frontend: a full stack developer.
• Servers, deploys and scaling: a DevOps engineer.

Frequently asked questions

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