When most HR and operations leaders compare “TN engineers vs local hiring,” they look at one line: base salary.
That’s useful, but dangerously incomplete.
Over the next three years, the real cost of an engineering role is driven by vacancy days, overtime, scrap, missed launches, turnover, and re-recruiting—not just what’s on the offer letter. For manufacturers and engineering-heavy plants, those invisible costs can easily outweigh visa fees or legal spend.
This article walks through a practical 3-year cost model comparing a local-only strategy with a TN-enabled strategy using Mexican engineers, using realistic ranges (not guarantees) you can adapt with your own numbers. The goal: give you a way to talk to finance in their language—and make TN engineers part of a coherent capacity plan, not a one-off exception.
Understanding the TN Engineers Cost Comparison can provide valuable insights into the hidden costs associated with hiring practices.
Why Your Current Hiring Math Is Incomplete
The default comparison everyone makes: salary vs salary
When a key engineering role opens, the first instinct is to compare:
- “What would we pay a local engineer?”
- “What would we pay a TN engineer from Mexico?”
U.S. engineers in fields like mechanical and controls regularly see median wages around or above US$100k.
By contrast, engineers working in Mexico often earn substantially less in local roles. One estimate places average engineer pay around MX$647k annually (roughly the mid-US$30k range depending on exchange rates), with mechanical engineers averaging about MX$10.1k per month.
Those gaps explain why so many companies look to Mexico as a talent source. But for TN hires physically working in the U.S., you still need to offer competitive, professional-level pay for your location. There is no formal prevailing wage requirement for TNs like there is for H-1B, but State Department guidance is clear that pay must be consistent with professional-level employment.
So yes, there may be some salary flexibility, but the real advantage of a TN strategy comes from time, stability, and throughput, not bargain-basement wages.
The hidden line items you never see in a job offer
The real leak in your P&L usually isn’t salary; it’s what happens when a role sits open or is filled with the wrong person:
- Cost of vacancy – Lost throughput, delays, and rework while the seat is empty. Cost-of-vacancy models commonly estimate hundreds of dollars per day for critical roles; one example for a US$70k engineer estimated ~US$270 per vacancy day, and broader models show ranges from ~US$460–600/day for high-impact positions.
- Overtime and burnout – Overtime studies in manufacturing show performance and quality declining as overtime rises, with reject rates and customer dissatisfaction increasing.
- Turnover and re-recruiting – Multiple analyses put total turnover cost anywhere from roughly 30% to 130%+ of annual salary, once you add separation, recruiting, training, and lost productivity.
None of those show up when you compare “US$110k vs US$95k.”
Why focusing on annual budgets hides multi-year risk
Ultimately, a comprehensive analysis, including the TN Engineers Cost Comparison, is essential for making informed hiring decisions.
Annual budgets push leaders to ask, “What does this cost this year?” But a bad hiring strategy compounds over time:
- A 60–90-day vacancy in year one becomes a chronic bottleneck if the role keeps turning over. Benchmarks for engineering time-to-fill commonly land around two months or more.
- Each new hire restarts ramp-up and training.
- Overtime becomes “normal,” elevating risk of fatigue-related errors and safety issues.
A 3-year view forces you to ask: What’s the total cost of running this role under our current model versus a TN-enabled model?
Building a True Cost Model for Engineering Roles
Think of your 3-year cost curve as four buckets: direct costs, indirect costs, cost of vacancy, and turnover risk. You can plug in your own numbers; below are typical categories and ranges you can adapt.
Direct costs: salary, benefits, recruiting, legal, relocation
For each scenario (local-only vs TN-enabled), estimate:
- Base salary + benefits
- Local engineer: anchored to your local market and role level (often around or above BLS medians).
- TN engineer: usually competitive with local ranges, but with some flexibility because there is no formal prevailing wage process.
- Recruiting costs
- Job boards, recruiter time, agency retainers, technical assessments, travel.
- For specialized engineering roles, SHRM-cited analyses regularly put direct recruiting costs in the tens of thousands per hire.
- Legal and immigration costs (TN only)
- Internal time to gather job details and support letters.
- Optional attorney fees—often in the low thousands per TN engineer based on typical legal fee ranges for TNs.
- Relocation / onboarding
- Travel, temporary housing, stipends, onboarding time.
Indirect costs: overtime, training churn, burnout, quality hits
These are where TN engineers often pay for themselves:
- Overtime – If your team is consistently at 10–20% overtime while a role is open, productivity and quality usually suffer; one manufacturing study linked higher overtime with measurable declines in output quality and productivity.
- Training churn – Repeatedly onboarding marginal fits or short-tenure engineers keeps senior staff stuck in training instead of improvement work.
- Burnout – Fatigue research consistently ties long hours to higher error rates, safety incidents, and lost productivity.
A TN-enabled strategy doesn’t eliminate these costs, but it can shorten the periods where you’re in crisis mode.
Cost of vacancy and missed production (with scenario ranges)
To illustrate vacancy cost, many HR and recruiting models suggest:
Cost of Vacancy ≈ (role salary ÷ working days) × impact factor × vacancy days
For a single critical engineer, examples from cost-of-vacancy guides regularly land in the tens of thousands of dollars for a multi-month vacancy, and some estimates for senior roles show totals that can reach into six figures when delays and lost opportunities are fully loaded.
You don’t need perfect precision. You do need consistency: use the same logic to compare your local-only approach vs a mixed local/TN pipeline.
Local-Only vs TN-Enabled Hiring: 3-Year Scenarios
Now let’s compare two plants with the same problem: a chronic vacancy for a controls engineer.
- Plant A – Local only: Posts repeatedly, relies on overtime and contractors while waiting for “the perfect local hire.”
- Plant B – Local + TN: Keeps local recruiting, but actively taps Mexican engineers under TN to shorten vacancy windows.
All numbers below are illustrative ranges, not guarantees. Exact outcomes depend on your wages, geography, shift patterns, and demand.
Scenario A: “We’ll find someone locally eventually”
Typical pattern over three years:
- Time-to-fill for each engineer: 60–90 days (common for technical roles).
- Teams cover with 10–20% overtime, plus short-term contractors.
- One bad hire leaves after 12–18 months, restarting the cycle.
- Turnover cost for that engineer (separation, recruiting, training, lost productivity) can easily amount to a significant fraction of annual salary according to multiple industry estimates.
Over three years, Plant A absorbs:
- Repeated recruiting cycles and agency fees
- Multiple stretches of overtime fatigue and quality risk
- One or two manufacturing “fire drills” tied to the missing skills (delayed launch, troubleshooting backlog, etc.)
On a finance slide, you’ll see lots of small line items scattered across departments—but not a single line labeled “cost of local-only strategy.”
Scenario B: “Blend local and TN to fill critical gaps faster”
Plant B keeps local recruitment but adds a deliberate TN pipeline:
- Identifies roles with clear TN-eligible categories (e.g., Engineer) and degree requirements.
- Partners with immigration counsel and a recruitment firm focused on Mexico and Canada.
- Uses TNs to target the longest-vacant or highest-impact roles first.
Even if base salaries are roughly similar, the 3-year math shifts because:
- Vacancy days shrink – A TN process that can be completed in weeks rather than months reduces cost-of-vacancy significantly. 3A’s own guidance notes that TN engineers can often be onboarded far faster than alternatives like H-1B.
- Overtime and contractor usage drops – You spend less on short-term coverage and avoid the productivity penalty of chronic overtime.
- Turnover risk diversifies – Instead of betting everything on one difficult-to-hire local profile, you have multi-country pipelines.
For many plants, those three effects alone can add up to six-figure differences over three years for a small cluster of critical engineering roles, even when you factor in reasonable legal and relocation costs. The exact number is less important than proving, with your own inputs, that the shape of the cost curve looks better with a TN-enabled plan.
Sensitivity checks: what if salary gaps narrow or widen?
Because TN engineers working in the U.S. should still be paid as professionals in your market, salary differences may be modest. But even small deltas matter when multiplied by three years and multiple roles.
Your sensitivity analysis should ask:
- If TN salaries are similar to local salaries: do we still win on vacancy, overtime, and stability?
- If TN salaries are 5–15% lower (consistent with the flexibility created by the absence of a prevailing wage process and differing expectations), how much does that change the 3-year picture?
- If local salary inflation outpaces our TN offers, what does that do to out-year spend?
Request a TN Hiring Cost Analysis with 3A Immigration Services
Why Legal Fees Are Often the Cheapest Line Item
One-time legal vs recurring overtime and turnover costs
Legal fees for a TN petition are a visible, controllable line item. Overtime, quality escapes, and turnover costs are not—yet they often end up larger over a multi-year period.
Think of a single chronic vacancy:
- A one-time TN legal spend in the low-thousands range.
- Versus multi-month vacancy costs that cost-of-vacancy models estimate at tens of thousands of dollars.
- Plus overtime, scrap, rework, and possible penalties for late delivery.
Viewed that way, legal is insurance against a much bigger leak.
How predictable legal spend de-risks your P&L
Finance teams like:
- Predictability – TN legal spend can usually be forecast by role and headcount plan.
- Capitalization potential – In some contexts, certain project-linked costs can be tracked alongside capital or program budgets.
- Scalability – Once you have a template TN process, incremental cases are easier to plan around.
By contrast, vacancy, overtime, and quality issues show up as noise in multiple cost centers—harder to model and explain.
What finance leaders actually care about in these decisions
Your TN vs local story will land better with finance if you translate it into:
- Stabilized throughput – Fewer production surprises tied to key engineering gaps.
- Lower volatility – Less noise in overtime and contractor lines.
- Scenario-based planning – A clear range of outcomes (“in realistic scenarios, TN options keep us below X total cost over 3 years”).
Decision Point: When Does a TN Strategy Beat “Local-Only”?
Red flags that your local-only strategy is already too expensive
Signals that your current approach is costing more than you think:
- Time-to-fill for engineers consistently above 60 days.
- Overtime is baked into normal operations just to keep up.
- Chronic reliance on contractors for what should be core skills.
- Repeat vacancies in the same engineering roles.
If you see two or more of these, you’re paying a hidden premium for “local only.”
Thresholds to watch: vacancy duration, overtime percentage, reject rates
As a rule of thumb, TN exploration becomes compelling when:
- Vacancy duration for key roles consistently exceed your industry’s average (often around 2 months or more for engineering).
- Overtime regularly pushes beyond the level your safety and productivity teams are comfortable with.
- Reject rates, rework, or missed launch metrics start trending up as teams stretch to cover gaps.
A simple rule-of-thumb for when to explore TN engineers
If a role is:
- USMCA-eligible (e.g., Engineer) with a clear degree match;
- Critical to throughput or safety, and
- Vacant or unstable for more than one cycle (hire → exit → re-hire),
…then it is almost always worth modeling a TN scenario for that position.
Implementation: Designing a TN-Enabled Hiring Plan
Choosing which roles should be TN vs local
Start with:
- Controls, automation, or process roles that have direct impact on uptime and scrap.
- Hard-to-fill niche specialties (e.g., specific PLC platforms, robotics, specialized materials).
- Locations where local competition for engineers is intense.
You’re not replacing domestic talent; you’re stabilizing the floor so local recruiting and upskilling become more effective.
Partnering with a specialist vs DIY sourcing and petitions
You can, in theory, piece together:
- Your own sourcing channels in Mexico
- Internal TN letters drafted from templates
- Ad-hoc legal review
But most plants find better ROI by partnering with:
- A global mobility and immigration partner that understands TN engineering categories and recent USCIS guidance.
- A recruitment team with established engineering pipelines in Mexico.
That combination shortens time-to-fill and reduces the risk of preventable TN issues.
Integrating TN hiring into your workforce planning cycles
TN shouldn’t be a last-minute bailout. It should be:
- Built into annual workforce plans (“for these 5 roles, we’ll keep a TN option open”).
- Tied to capacity plans and launch timelines.
- Reviewed annually with HR, operations, finance, and legal to adjust for policy or market changes.
Common Mistakes When Comparing TN and Local Hiring
Only counting year-one cost instead of 3–5 years
Year-one cost ignores:
- Second-year turnover
- Extended vacancy in years two and three
- Compounding impact on quality, launches, and customer relationships
Most turnover and cost-of-vacancy frameworks emphasize that multi-year horizons are needed to see true cost.
Ignoring quality and throughput in the ROI calculation
A mildly cheaper staffing model that leads to:
- More downtime
- Higher reject rates
- Slower project delivery
…can easily be more expensive than a TN-enabled model once you quantify those impacts using the same cost-of-vacancy and overtime logic.
Underestimating the risk of “we’ll just ask for more overtime”
Overtime feels flexible, but evidence across manufacturing and industrial settings consistently ties long hours to:
- Reduced productivity
- Higher accident and error rates
- Increased turnover and health-related costs
It’s an emergency lever, not a sustainable staffing strategy.
Transformation: What Changes When You Treat TN as a Capacity Lever
From firefighting to planned hiring waves
With a TN-enabled plan:
- You decide in advance which roles will have multi-country pipelines.
- You pull TN options before overtime spirals out of control.
Hiring becomes part of planned capacity management instead of last-minute damage control.
From “hope recruiting works” to multi-country pipelines
Instead of hoping a scarce local engineer appears in the right window, you:
- Maintain ongoing relationships with engineering talent in Mexico.
- Use TNs strategically to cover known bottlenecks and new automation projects.
From budget anxiety to a clear, board-ready talent story
Most importantly, you can walk into a board or executive meeting with:
- A 3-year cost curve comparing local-only vs TN-enabled hiring
- Clear assumptions and ranges (not promises)
- A plan that shows how TN engineers help protect throughput, quality, and safety
Request a TN Hiring Cost Analysis
Share 1–3 critical engineering roles, current vacancy duration, and overtime patterns. 3A Immigration Services can model a realistic TN vs local cost curve—so you and your finance partners can make a decision based on evidence, not assumptions.
