hrmm. Which rates bracket are you asking about?
Heres how I think about salaries: They have nothing to do with cost of living, but of value created/negotiated.
Also compensation can be dramatically influenced by the nature of the dev work and skills needed. Eg: are you doing the architecting for your work, how quickly could you onboard someone else to do the work instead, how broad and deep the needed expertise are, etc
Many tech operations "outsource" because they can't find good people who they are able to hire. This could be for one of several reasons! 1) they just cant find people locally 2) they dont have money 3) they cant find people locally and they dont have money.
without knowing more about what youre doing, its hard to answer informatively.