What does an outsourced CTO cost? €550 a day, for which decisions?

€550 a day, two days a week: the managing director who asks for my rate has almost always done the multiplication already, and finds that it gets close to a CTO’s salary. The arithmetic gives a budget, but not yet a comparison: the work covered, availability and responsibility in each option still need examining.

I also want to examine the cost of waiting: the months when nobody has the mandate to decide, when the team circles the same three decisions, when hiring the “real” CTO slips from one quarter to the next.

My prices fit on two lines. €550 a day excluding VAT. The technical and organisational diagnostic, five days for €3,000 excluding VAT. I invoice without VAT from Mauritius. The rest says what those amounts buy, what the public benchmarks are worth, and what the salaried alternative really costs.

The simplest format sets a number of days over a period, and the budget reads directly.

Rhythm	Monthly budget excl. VAT	Budget over twelve months excl. VAT
2 days a month	€1,100	€13,200
4 days a month	€2,200	€26,400
8 days a month, roughly two days a week	€4,400	€52,800

These rows are multiplications of my rate, not off-the-shelf packages. Two days a month is advice: a few sessions on decisions and risks, and someone to call when things heat up. Two days a week is a presence alongside the team and the leadership, with trade-offs carried through to the end. Managing directors often pick the small number because it is less frightening; the real rhythm is set by the decisions to be made, and it moves during the engagement.

A fixed fee sets a price for a scope and deliverables. The diagnostic is the example: five days for €3,000 excluding VAT, a risk map, priorities at 30, 60 and 90 days and a recommended format. It protects the budget, and anything outside the agreed scope needs a new agreement: that is both its strength and its limit.

A structuring engagement lasts a short period, to lay foundations before a hire, a funding round or a period of acceleration. It is billed by the day or as a fixed fee. Its end is written in from the beginning, which forces you to organise the handover instead of suffering it.

You are going to look for a market price. So did I: no public benchmark isolates fractional CTO rates. Here is what the neighbouring comparisons are worth.

Malt’s freelance rates barometer, consulted on 11 October 2026, has no CTO or technical director category. Its closest families show an average daily rate of €576 for developers and €677 for project managers and agile coaches. The page says the figures are based on freelancers registered on the platform and updated in real time, without explaining the method. These amounts describe one platform and other jobs. The comparison is mine, not Malt’s: €550 a day for technical leadership is less than the average rate shown for a developer.

For a salaried CTO in France, the Apec job profile for IT directors, consulted on 11 October 2026, which lists “Chief Technical Officer (CTO)” among its alternative titles, states that 80% of the gross annual pay offered in job ads, fixed and variable combined, falls between €45k and €110k, with an average of €71k. These are published offers, not salaries paid, with no period given, before employer contributions, and an IT director’s job does not always match a startup CTO’s. Keep that number for the next section.

Comparing a day rate with a gross salary is comparing a full price with a truncated one. On top of the salary come employer contributions, which I do not put a figure on for lack of a source that applies to every case. And above all, time.

According to Apec’s study on executive recruitment practices in 2026, conducted among 1,150 companies with 10 or more employees about their 2025 hires, the average duration of the latest executive hire, which rose from 9 to 12 weeks between 2020 and 2022, has remained stable for two years. The same study states that 49% of companies that hired at least one executive in 2025 had difficulty filling their positions. These figures cover all executive roles, not CTOs alone.

Twelve weeks on average in that survey, not a minimum or a forecast for your hire. In the meantime, technical leadership decisions wait, or rest on someone without the mandate to make them. And the hire is done blind: who in the company can judge a candidate’s technical depth when that is precisely the skill that is missing? The managing director risks choosing the most convincing candidate without having verified their competence. A mistake at this level is paid for in months.

Let us do the sum, with the caveats above. Eight days a month for twelve months, €52,800 excluding VAT, a mandate that can start before hiring is complete. Against that, an average gross salary of €71k for an IT director according to Apec, contributions on top, and, if your hire takes twelve weeks, an interim period to organise. This arithmetic does not make fractional leadership preferable in principle: a salaried CTO is there every day, carries the responsibility over time and can become a partner. The comparison still needs employer contributions and transition costs; someone must also own the decisions while hiring is under way.

Two outsourced CTO offers cannot be compared on their day rate if they do not cover the same work. Five questions put them on the same footing:

• Which decisions does the person make, propose, or leave to the leadership?
• What rhythm, what response times, what presence during an incident?
• Do they write code, or do they focus on trade-offs and the team?
• What documents, written decisions or plans stay with the company when they leave?
• How are the end of the engagement and the handover to someone internal planned?

A lower rate for a vague scope can cost more than a higher rate for precise decisions, because vagueness is paid for in meetings. Two days a month do not replace a daily presence, and a full-time role is no use if decisions do not fill it. The article on the freelance CTO details the situations where this kind of engagement applies and how to frame the collaboration.

The right budget comes not from a rate but from the decisions waiting for an owner. If someone internal already carries technical leadership with the time and the mandate it takes, the right spend is zero, and the “Do you need a CTO?” assessment may well conclude just that.

If the need exists, the article Hiring a CTO helps you choose between an internal step up, a hire and fractional leadership, and the fractional CTO offer describes how a mandate is framed. If you cannot distinguish a lack of leadership from an organisational or capacity problem, the diagnostic can help define the need: five days, €3,000 excluding VAT, to examine whether you need someone, at what pace, or whether the team can take those decisions on. What not choosing costs appears on no invoice, which is what lets it go on.