Counteroffers are normal
Mexican employers routinely counter, and they counter fast. If your loop takes eleven days between final interview and offer letter, you will lose people. We hold candidates warm, but the only real fix is deciding quickly.
01 · Mexico
Mexico: the same working day, on a contract we hold ourselves
This is where we live. Our office is on Álvaro Obregón in Roma Norte, our payroll team stamps CFDIs from the fourth floor, and every Mexican hire you make through us is employed on our entity — not a partner's, not a marketplace's.
UTC−6Central zone, no daylight saving since 2022
~2 weeksWhat people actually give their current employer
MXNPaid in pesos, banded in USD if you prefer
5–8 daysIntake to shortlist on a standard engineering role
Time zone
You will forget they are in another country
Mexico scrapped nationwide daylight saving in October 2022. Most of the country — Mexico City, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Querétaro, Mérida — now sits on UTC−6 all year. From early November to mid-March that is exactly US Central time: your 9am standup in Austin is their 9am standup. From mid-March, when the US springs forward, they land one hour behind you. Nothing else changes.
Practically, a Mexico City engineer overlaps roughly 8 hours with Chicago, 7 with New York and 6 with San Francisco. That is a shared working day, not "four hours of overlap". They are online for your sprint planning, your 3pm pairing session and the incident that starts at 4:30. The only real friction is with a US team that runs a 7am East Coast ritual — that is 6am for them, and we tell candidates upfront when a role has one.
Working hours locally run 9:00 to 18:00 with a real lunch break, often taken later than a US team expects, around 14:00. Nobody minds moving it. It is worth knowing before you read anything into a quiet Slack channel at 2pm.
Public holidays that will surprise you
The statutory list is short — nine days — but the ones that catch US managers are the first Monday of February (Constitution Day), the third Monday of March (Benito Juárez), 1 and 5 May, 16 September and the third Monday of November. Holy Week is not statutory, but a large share of the country takes Thursday and Friday off anyway, and 12 December and 2 November move a lot of calendars. We hand your manager the year's calendar during onboarding.
Employment
What "employed in Mexico" actually involves
Every one of these lines is handled by our team in Mexico City. Your finance department sees one invoice per month.
- Documents at signing
- CURP, RFC with the SAT, INE identification, proof of address, and bank CLABE for dispersal. If a candidate has been freelancing they often need to change their SAT regime from RESICO to salaried — we do that for them, and it is the single most common cause of a delayed start date.
- Contract type
- Contrato individual de trabajo por tiempo indeterminado, with a 30-day probation period for standard roles or 180 days for managerial and specialist positions. Fixed-term contracts exist but are hard to defend for ongoing work, so we rarely use them.
- Social security
- IMSS registration within five working days of the start date, INFONAVIT for housing, and SAR/AFORE retirement contributions. Employer burden lands around 28–32% on top of gross salary depending on the salary level and risk class.
- Payroll receipts
- CFDI 4.0 nómina receipts stamped with the SAT for every payment. Payroll runs on the 15th and the last day of the month, which is the local norm; a monthly-only cycle reads as a red flag to candidates.
- Aguinaldo
- A statutory year-end bonus, minimum 15 days of salary, payable by 20 December. Competitive employers pay 20 to 30 days, and for senior engineering roles we usually advise 30 — it is a cheap differentiator in an offer.
- PTU
- Profit sharing, distributed by end of May, capped at three months' salary or the average of the last three years' PTU, whichever favours the worker. It surprises US finance teams every single year, so we forecast it in your budget from month one.
- Vacation and prima
- Since the 2023 reform, 12 vacation days in year one, rising annually, plus a 25% vacation premium on those days. Most of our clients grant 15 to 20 from the start.
- NOM-035
- The psychosocial risk standard: policy, questionnaires, and documented follow-up. We run it on schedule and keep the evidence file, because it is inspected and fines are real.
Money
What roles cost in Mexico right now
Annual gross salary, before employer burden, from offers we have made or lost in the last two quarters. Mexico City and Monterrey sit at the top of each range; Guadalajara is typically 5–10% below the top, Mérida and Querétaro 15–20% below.
| Role | MXN / year | USD equivalent | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mid-level backend engineer (4–6 yrs) | 780,000 – 1,050,000 | 42k – 57k | Node, Python, Go, Java. Deep pool in Guadalajara. |
| Senior backend engineer (7+ yrs) | 1,150,000 – 1,700,000 | 62k – 92k | Top of band needs distributed systems depth and C1 English. |
| Senior React / front-end | 1,050,000 – 1,500,000 | 57k – 81k | Largest single category we recruit for. |
| DevOps / platform engineer | 1,200,000 – 1,750,000 | 65k – 95k | Tightest market of the four; AWS plus Terraform is the standard ask. |
| Data engineer | 1,100,000 – 1,600,000 | 60k – 87k | dbt and Snowflake or BigQuery in nearly every requisition. |
| QA automation engineer | 620,000 – 950,000 | 34k – 51k | Playwright has largely replaced Selenium in new roles. |
| Bilingual support specialist | 300,000 – 520,000 | 16k – 28k | Zendesk or Intercom; night shifts carry a premium. |
| Staff accountant (US GAAP exposure) | 420,000 – 700,000 | 23k – 38k | NetSuite or QuickBooks; bilingual accountants are scarcer than engineers. |
| Accounting manager / controller | 900,000 – 1,400,000 | 49k – 76k | Expect a counteroffer; local firms fight to keep these people. |
Converted at roughly 18.4 MXN to the dollar. Add 28–32% employer burden plus aguinaldo and PTU to reach the true annual cost of an employed seat.
Local reality
Things we tell clients before their first Mexican hire
Notice is short — plan for it
There is no statutory notice from the employee's side. Two weeks is the courtesy standard, and plenty of people leave in one. That means a Mexican hire can realistically be at your standup 18 days after you say yes.
Hybrid still exists here
Mexico City candidates in tech expect fully remote from a US employer and are surprised by anything else. If your role needs occasional on-site time, say so in the first screen, not in the offer call.
Start in Mexico
If you want speed and a full shared working day, this is the market. Send us the role and we will come back with the band, the realistic start date, and the two or three requirements we would drop.