What a GCC actually is, and what it costs to exist

A Global Capability Centre is a company’s own subsidiary in India: its own entity, offices, HR, legal, finance, and leadership. Goldman Sachs runs one with thousands of people. So do Microsoft, Amazon, Target, and hundreds of others. Increasingly they’re not back offices; global product and engineering leadership genuinely sits in India now.

But look at what a GCC requires before employee number one is productive. An incorporated Indian entity, which takes 10 to 16 weeks before it can legally run payroll. Registrations: PF, ESI, professional tax, Shops and Establishments, GST. Office space in cities where the GCC boom itself is inflating rents. A country head senior enough to run it, who will cost more than your first several engineers combined. Ongoing statutory filings, audits, transfer pricing documentation, board formalities.

That overhead is fixed. It costs about the same whether you employ 5 people or 500. Which is exactly why it makes sense for a company hiring 500, and destroys a company hiring 5. The GCC model works because of scale. The headlines are a story about scale, not a template for you.

The three doors into India

Every company entering India walks through one of three doors. We wrote a full decision framework earlier this year; here’s the short version, updated with what the GCC boom changes.

Door one: contractors. Fast and cheap until someone works full-time, on your tools, on your schedule, and Indian law decides they were an employee all along. With the Labour Codes now enforcing gratuity for fixed-term workers after one year and two-day final settlements, misclassification is more expensive than it was in 2024. Fine for genuinely independent freelancers. Wrong for your core team.

Door two: your own entity, the baby GCC. Right answer at scale. The commonly cited crossover is around 25 India employees; below that, the entity’s fixed costs, setup time, and admin load cost more than they save. Above it, and especially past 100, the economics flip and an entity becomes the obvious move.

Door three: EOR. A legal employer of record, like us, employs your people in India. You direct their work; the EOR carries compliance, payroll, and statutory filings. No entity, no registrations, no country head. Offer to first payroll in under three weeks, at $99 per employee per month with Saileor. This is the door for your first one to twenty-five hires.

The honest sequence for most startups: EOR now, entity later if India grows, GCC someday if you become the kind of company that hires by the thousand. Every door stays open. Nothing about starting with EOR stops you converting later; your EOR employees can transfer to your entity when you build one.

What the GCC hiring boom in India means for you

The talent pool the GCCs are fighting over is available to you today. Same Bengaluru engineers, same AI skills. A 20-person startup can make one offer through an EOR this month and have that person on payroll before a GCC’s entity paperwork clears.

You can outbid them where it counts. GCCs offer brand and stability. You offer ownership, scope, and equity. The engineer who’d be one of 5,000 at a captive centre is employee #14 at your company with real product authority. In our experience placing candidates, that trade wins more often than founders expect.

Look where the GCCs aren’t. Tier-2 city hiring is growing 23% year on year, nearly double the metro pace, precisely because Bengaluru salaries are inflating. A remote-first startup with an EOR isn’t tied to any city. Hire the excellent engineer in Jaipur or Coimbatore whom the office-bound GCCs structurally can’t reach.

The AI premium is real and rising. With 64% of new GCC roles demanding AI and data skills, those salaries carry a 30% to 50% premium over generalists. Budget for it going in. Our cost calculator will give you the loaded number.

The question that actually matters

Not “should we do what Amazon is doing.” Amazon committed $35 billion to India; your Series A was not that.

The question is: would your company be better with two or three excellent India engineers on the team in August? If yes, the 510,000-job headline is your confirmation that the talent, the ecosystem, and the momentum are there. The mechanism just isn’t a GCC. It’s a signed offer letter and an EOR agreement, this month, for less than the GCC spends on its office plants.

Take the India Hiring Readiness Score, eight questions, ninety seconds, and it tells you which door fits your stage, with timelines and costs. Or book 30 minutes with us and we’ll walk through your case.