The GCC hiring squeeze: what it now costs to build a capability centre in India
Global capability centres added a record number of roles in India last year. Salary inflation at the senior end is the constraint nobody budgeted for.
Kavya Iyer
Director, GCC & Operations · 27 August 2026 · 7 min read
India's global capability centre sector has moved from cost arbitrage to capability ownership. The roles being moved are no longer support functions — they are product ownership, platform engineering and, increasingly, P&L accountability.
That shift has repriced the top of the market. Entry and mid-level salaries have risen roughly in line with inflation. Senior individual contributors and site leadership have not: we are seeing 25–40% premiums over the equivalent role in a domestic Indian enterprise, and for GCC site leaders with a prior build-from-scratch record, considerably more.
The practical consequence for anyone planning a build is that the headcount model and the compensation model have to be built together. A plan that assumes a uniform 15% uplift across all bands will hit its first serious problem at the leadership hire — which is also the hire that determines whether the rest of the plan is deliverable.
Bengaluru and Hyderabad remain the deepest markets, but Pune and Chennai are now viable for engineering and shared services respectively, with meaningfully lower attrition. Our clients building second sites are increasingly choosing them deliberately rather than as a fallback.
Our advice to anyone setting a 2027 budget: price the top three leadership roles at real market rates before you fix the total, and build a retention envelope for months 12–24, when the first cohort becomes visible to the rest of the market.