How Much Does it Cost to Hire a React Native Developer in 2025?

You’re seeing the shift to mobile and realizing a responsive website isn’t enough to keep users coming back, you want that home screen icon.

If you’re here, you’re probably asking a simple question: “How much will it cost me to hire a React Native developer in 2025?”

React Native sounds like the perfect solution: "Write once, run anywhere." You figure you can hire one developer for both iOS and Android, minimizing costs.

Then you see the price tag.

Hiring high-quality mobile talent in 2025 is a shock.

Between soaring salaries, recruitment fees, and fierce competition for seniors, an "efficient" cross-platform project can easily spiral into a six-figure liability before you launch version 1.0.

In this guide, we break down exactly what it costs to hire a React Native developer, from freelance rates to global salaries. We also uncover the hidden costs most budgets miss and reveal a "third way" to launch your app without hiring a single new employee.

React Native Developer Salary 2025

If you just want the numbers, here is the state of the market. React Native developers are among the most in-demand professionals in tech, and their compensation reflects that.

The average base salary for a US React Native developer is typically $129,000 per year. However, averages are misleading. A junior might accept $80,000, while a senior architect can command $160,000+.

Here is a snapshot of typical annual salaries for remote-friendly React Native roles by region:

Data sources: ZipRecruiter and Glassdoor, among others.

Local-market salaries in regions like India are often lower, while highly experienced remote developers working for Western companies can command more.

As you can see, location is the single biggest lever you have on price. But price is rarely the only factor. Let’s look at what actually drives these costs.

Factors Influencing the Cost

Why does one developer charge $40/hour while another invoices $150/hour? When you are budgeting for a React Native hire, three main variables will dictate your final spend.

1. Location and Cost of Living

Location is the biggest cost lever.

• Onshore (US/UK/Canada): Highest cost. Best for communication and time zone alignment.
• Nearshore (LatAm/Eastern Europe): The "Goldilocks" zone. Rates are 40-60% lower than onshore, with high technical standards and overlapping hours.
• Offshore (Asia): Lowest rates. You can find incredible talent, but time zones and varying quality often require hands-on management.
  

2. Experience Level

Mobile app development is unforgiving. A junior web developer might break a CSS layout, and it looks a bit wonky.

A junior mobile developer might ship a memory leak that crashes the app on 30% of your users' devices.

• Junior: Good for bug fixes and UI tweaks, but they cannot architect a scalable app.
• Mid-Level: The workhorses. They can build features independently but need guidance on complex architectural decisions.
• Senior: Essential for the first hire if you are building from scratch. If you are starting from zero, you cannot hire a junior. You need someone who knows how to structure the project, handle app store certificates, and manage native integrations.

3. Engagement Model

How you hire is just as important as who you hire.

Freelancer ($50 - $150/hour): Flexible, but risky. Good freelance React Native developers are expensive and juggle clients. If they ghost you before launch, you have no recourse.

Agency ($100 - $200/hour): Agencies offer reliability (PMs, QA, backups), but you pay a premium. A simple agency app often starts at $50,000-$100,000 for an MVP, according to typical cost breakdowns.

Full-Time Employee (Salary): Total control and IP ownership, but the biggest commitment: hiring a full-time developer is a long-term liability, not a one-off project cost.

In 2025, typical React Native hourly rates look roughly like this:

• United States: $70–$150/hour
• Western Europe: $50–$120/hour
• Eastern Europe: $25–$80/hour
• Latin America: $25–$90/hour
• India & Asia: $20–$70/hour

Your exact costs will depend on where you hire from, the seniority you need, and whether you work with freelancers, agencies, or full-time staff.

The Hidden Costs of Hiring In-House

Base salary is just the tip of the iceberg. Founders often budget $130,000 and assume that is the total cost. It isn't. The "Total Cost of Ownership" is typically 1.25x to 1.5x that number.

• Recruitment Fees/Time: Recruiters often charge 15-20% of the first year's salary, a $25,000 check. Doing it yourself means 50+ hours of screening and interviewing.
• Benefits and Taxes: Health insurance, 401k matching, and payroll taxes add up fast.
• Equipment: You need top-tier MacBook Pros (iOS development requires macOS), test devices, and software licenses.
• Equity: To attract top talent away from Big Tech, you will likely need to offer stock options.
• Turnover Risk: The average engineer tenure is often under two years. If your sole developer leaves, development stalls completely.

When calculating the cost to create an app, you have to factor in these operational realities. A $130k hire is really a $170k+ annual commitment.

Keep React Native salaries in context with other build paths using our full cost breakdown for converting a website into an app

React Native vs Native: Is it Cheaper?

Is React Native cheaper than "true" native development (Swift/Kotlin)?

The answer is yes, but not by 50%.

Pure native requires two distinct codebases and often two teams (iOS and Android) and two salaries. With React Native vs native development, one developer can ship to both platforms using a single codebase.

However, React Native isn't magic.

It sometimes requires "bridging" into native code for specific features (like advanced camera usage or background location). This means your React Native developer still needs to understand some Objective-C, Swift, Java, or Kotlin.

This "unicorn" skillset is why senior React Native developers often command higher hourly rates than their pure-native counterparts, even if the total project cost is lower because you only need one of them.

Set React Native against native builds before you commit with our guide to React Native vs native development

Why You Might Not Need to Hire At All

If you are a tech startup building the next Uber or TikTok, hiring a dedicated React Native team makes sense. The app is the product. You need custom gesture handling, complex local databases, and pixel-perfect transitions that require a full in-house engineering team.

But what if you are an ecommerce brand or digital publisher?

Your core product is your inventory or content. You already have a high-performing mobile website. You just need to package that experience into a native app to unlock push notifications and home screen real estate.

For you, hiring a developer is inefficient.

The MobiLoud Alternative

MobiLoud is not a DIY builder, and it’s not an agency. We’re a fully managed service that turns your existing website into a premium native mobile app.

Instead of committing $170k+ per year to a single in-house developer once you factor in benefits and overhead, or spending $150k/year rebuilding what you already have through an agency, MobiLoud leverages your existing web infrastructure to launch in weeks for a tiny fraction of that on a predictable subscription.

• No new code: Your app syncs 100% with your website. Update the site, and the app updates instantly. All the CRO work, templates, navigation, and checkout tweaks you've refined on the web carry over to the app automatically, so you don't lose any of that effort.
• Fraction of the cost: A flat setup fee and predictable monthly subscription cost significantly less than a junior developer.
• Zero maintenance: We handle updates and technical maintenance. You don't worry about iOS updates breaking your app. we do.
• Native power: You get unlimited push notifications, native tab bars, and a dedicated pesence on the App Store and Google Play.

This isn’t just theory. We helped buybuyBaby relaunch quickly after an acquisition, with limited engineering resources.

Using MobiLoud, they relaunched their mobile apps while cutting development costs by around 90% compared to a traditional custom rebuild, all while keeping a consistent experience across web and app.

The result is a dedicated mobile channel that improves retention and customer lifetime value (LTV) without the cost and risk of building and maintaining an in-house mobile team.

We also have additional case studies from other successful brands that have scaled their mobile apps with MobiLoud, showing similar outcomes in faster launch times, significantly lower development costs, and stronger retention across their mobile users.

Skip the hiring scramble and launch a live app faster with our step by step website to app guide

Final Thoughts

The cost to hire a React Native developer varies wildly from $50/hour for an offshore freelancer to $180,000/year for a Silicon Valley senior engineer.

If you have the budget and the specific technical need for a custom-built product, React Native is a fantastic technology that saves time compared to pure native development.

But for many founders, the goal isn't "software development", it's business growth.

If your goal is to launch a mobile channel to improve retention and drive sales, you likely don't need to hire anyone. You just need to take the high-quality web experience you’ve already built and bridge it to the App Store.

MobiLoud lets you skip the hiring process, the payroll taxes, and the six-month roadmap. You get a top-tier app in weeks, not months, for a fraction of the price of a single hire.

Your website is one step away from the App Store, book a demo with us to see how.