Closed Block Migration Staffing: How Many Data Engineers, and for How Long

Last updated: October 20, 2026

By Khurram Tehseen, FSA, Founder and Principal at Operating Alpha

A closed block conversion team models at four contract seats, a data analyst, a senior data engineer, a business systems analyst and a senior project manager, costing about $430,700 for six months at national medians. That figure comes from the KORE1 Contract Rate Index 2026-Q4 (modeled, October 2026) and prices every seat at 40 hours a week for all 26 weeks.

Open the data tape and count the columns.

A tape cut for pricing carries a row per coverage, with issue age, sex, risk class, face amount, premium mode and a plan code, frozen at one valuation date. The seller’s administration system holds far more than that. Somewhere past the first hundred columns there is a field everyone calls by a nickname, and the data dictionary, if one exists, stopped being updated two releases ago.

Ask who knows what the values mean. One name comes back. That person sits on the seller’s side of the transition services agreement.

That is the first headcount calculation. It happens before anyone writes a job description. Row counts tell you how big the analyst’s problem is. Columns nobody can define tell you how senior the engineer has to be. The gap between the tape and the converted file tells you what the reconciliation seat does all week, and the end date on the agreement tells you what the project manager is for. Four seats, four numbers.

Every block acquisition is a data project wearing an M&A costume. Staff it like one. The data work itself is laid out on KORE1’s closed block migration data services page. This piece is the staffing plan behind it, with weeks, hours and modeled cost for each seat. KORE1 gets paid when you fill these seats through its data engineering staff augmentation desk, and I work alongside them on block conversions, so the sources and the arithmetic are on the page for you to check.

How Many People Does a Block Conversion Actually Need?

A closed block conversion team is the group that moves an acquired or reinsured block of in-force policies from the seller’s administration system onto the buyer’s, then proves that each policy, face amount and tax field arrived intact. Contract staffing suits it because the work has a start, a cutover date, and very little to keep afterward.

Four seats. For a block of one product family moving from one seller system to one new policy administration platform, four people cover it.

A fifth is a symptom. Sometimes the symptom is a second source system, say a life book and an annuity book that never lived on the same platform, and then a second senior data engineer is justified. Sometimes it is a seller who delivers files late and a buyer who answers by adding bodies. A fifth person shortens nothing.

Buyers keep coming. The NAIC counted 137 private equity owned U.S. insurers at year-end 2024, up from 90 in 2018, and block buyers are among them. Many will not approve three or four permanent data hires to convert one. Devin Hornick, a Partner at KORE1, put the budget logic in a content planning email on October 16: “Companies may not approve three or four permanent hires, but they may absolutely approve the resources or project team necessary to complete a $300K or $500K initiative that has already been funded.”

A block conversion fits. Funded at signing, dated by the agreement, and finished when the converted file ties out.

What Does Each of the Four Seats Own?

Start with the tape analyst, a mid-level data analyst. The work starts there. This seat profiles the seller’s file before anyone maps anything. Rows per file, nulls by column, duplicate policy keys, issue dates that fall after the valuation date, the columns with no definition. The output is a written list of questions for the seller, and the list is the deliverable. Not a slide deck. A profile that stays on the analyst’s laptop does nothing for the schedule.

The mapping engineer is a senior data engineer, the most expensive seat. I would never staff it junior. Source-to-target spec, load code, and every decision about what a rider is. The classic trap is a plan code reused across issue years, one product before a rule change and another after, and the engineer who has met that trap before sees it in week one. Worth it. Premium history has to come across too, because under section 7702A a policy that fails the seven-pay test becomes a modified endowment contract, and the new system cannot tell which contracts are which without it.

Reconciliation. A mid-level business systems analyst holds it. Most plans skip it.

Walk the count every month. Policies on the tape, less deaths, lapses, maturities, plus revivals, less the riders the tape counted as policies, less what the seller kept at signing, equals what should be in the converted file. On the invented 212,400-policy block on KORE1’s closed block page that arithmetic leaves 415 policies unexplained, and the reconciliation seat owns that line until it reads zero or every row on it has a named owner. Without this seat the unmatched policies sit in a spreadsheet until the week before cutover. Worst week to find them.

The senior project manager reads the transition services schedule before anyone else on the team does. What the seller owes, by which date. In which layout. Who answers when a file arrives short. The cutover plan. And the date on which the old system stops being the book of record. If the project manager is also the person the sponsor calls for status, the engineers get to work.

What the Four Seats Cost at Index Medians

All four rows below are modeled from BLS wages unless a row says otherwise. They are bill rates, what an employer pays per hour through a staffing firm, and they include payroll taxes, workers’ compensation, insurance and a modeled 24% employer burden.

Two details. KORE1’s own project manager placements, 21 of them started from 2023 to 2026 and mostly in Southern California, billed above the modeled senior national figure, $116 against $106 at the median. Swap the observed project manager into the team and the six-month total moves to about $441,800. Metro matters too. The spread on the engineer is real money, since a senior mapping engineer in Philadelphia runs about $13,900 more over six months than the national median, while Minneapolis-St. Paul comes in about $7,700 under it. A conversion rarely needs the engineer in the same city as the block. Rates for the other seats by city are in the IT contractor rates by city page.

How Many Weeks Does Each Seat Run?

Longer than the median. For a reason.

Across 410 KORE1 IT contract assignments the median ran 136 days, about 19 weeks. A block conversion modeled at 26 weeks runs 182 days. Not padding. A median assignment ends when the work does, while a conversion ends on a date written into an agreement, with a parallel run squeezed in before it. A single product, a single source system and a clean tape could get you toward the 19-week end. I rarely see all three.

In hours, a seat held for all 26 weeks is 1,040, which makes 4,160 for the team, and one week of all four seats costs about $16,600.

Overlap changes the bill. The $430,700 assumes everyone for the whole 26 weeks, which is a planning figure and not a quote. If the tape analyst rolls off after week 14, when the mapping is done and the questions are answered, that is 12 weeks at 40 hours and a $95 median, about $45,600 saved. Plans that bring the engineer in at week 3 save a little more. Plans that bring the reconciliation analyst in late tend to pay for it in week 20. It happens.

What Breaks If the Conversion Slips Past the Transition Services Date?

A transition services agreement is the seller’s promise to keep administering the block until a set date. After that date you are negotiating, not planning.

First, the book of record. Premiums, claims and policyholder service keep running on the seller’s system while the buyer’s system receives a partial conversion, so for a stretch there are two administration systems, each holding part of the truth. Somebody has to say, for every policy, which one is current this month. That somebody is usually an analyst who was meant to be doing something else.

Reporting breaks next. The reinsurer wants its monthly figures and the board wants one number for the block. Drawing both from two systems means a hand tie-out, every month, in a spreadsheet, and the spreadsheet becomes the new person who is the database.

The arithmetic is plain enough. Each week of slip adds about $16,600 to the contract team, and a quarter adds about $215,400. Put your own extension quote from the seller next to that figure. Then decide. I make no prediction about what any regulator or counterparty would do about a late conversion, and neither should the plan. It only has to show what each late week costs in people and in reconciliation work, and who is doing it.

Which Seats Roll Off After Cutover, and Which One Should You Keep?

The tape analyst goes first. Often well before cutover. The profile is done, the questions are answered, and the seat has nothing to do in the parallel run.

The mapping engineer stays through the first month on the new platform, because a load bug found in month one is a two-day fix and in month four is an incident. The project manager rolls off when the converted file is accepted and the transition services schedule is closed out.

Keep the reconciliation analyst.

The seat is mid-level and cheap beside the engineer’s. By the end of the run, though, that analyst knows why 415 policies were unexplained, which riders the tape counted twice, which seller contact answers the phone, and what the walk looked like in month three before anyone changed the extract. That knowledge lives in one head, and it is exactly the knowledge the first valuation on the new platform will need. Convert the seat to staff, or hold it for the first full quarter. Either beats losing it.

How Do You Run the Team Hourly and Keep the Scope Honest?

Hourly. Your manager directs the work, you pay for the hours worked, and a week more or a week less shows up in the next invoice at about $16,600 a week for the whole team. No fixed fee. No overrun to dispute.

Scope stays honest when done has a definition that is a number. The unexplained line on the monthly walk reads zero, or every row on it has a name beside it. Anything outside that, a new reporting request, a new product the seller forgot to mention, goes to the sponsor as a change in seats and weeks, with the price from the table beside it. The project manager’s job is to put that conversation on the calendar before the engineer finds the problem on their own.

One more control. Boring. It works. Go through the open items on the count walk every week, with the sponsor in the room, and ask only one question. What moved?

What Operations Leaders Ask Before Sizing the Team

A senior data engineer on contract, what does that run per hour?

$118 to $140 an hour nationally, median $129, or about $134,400 for six months at 40 hours a week (KORE1 Contract Rate Index 2026-Q4, modeled).

That is a bill rate, so it includes payroll taxes, insurance and a modeled 24% burden. Boston runs $128 to $143, Philadelphia $134 to $154, and Minneapolis-St. Paul $112 to $132.

How many data engineers does a closed block conversion need?

One senior data engineer carries the mapping on a single-source block moving to one new platform.

A second joins when there is a second source system or a second target, and a second senior engineer adds about $134,400 over six months at the national median. Adding one because the seller is slow rarely helps. Fix the schedule first.

Why does KORE1’s own project manager number run higher than the model?

Because 21 KORE1 placements started from 2023 to 2026, mostly in Southern California, billed $105 to $124 an hour with a median of $116, above the modeled senior national median of $106.

Six months of the observed median is about $120,900, against $109,800 for the modeled seat. The sample leans senior and regional. Treat it as a check on the model. Not a national price.

How long does a closed block conversion team stay on?

About 26 weeks in this model, against a median of 136 days for KORE1 IT contract assignments (n=410).

In my experience the end date that matters is the one in the transition services agreement, and not the go-live of the tool. The analyst usually rolls off around week 14, the engineer and project manager stay through the first month-end, and the reconciliation seat is the one worth holding longer.

Count the Columns First

Before you size anything, take your own tape and count the columns nobody can define. Start there. That number tells you how senior the engineer has to be, and how many weeks to give the mapping.

If the staffing question comes next, contract staffing is how most buyers fill these four seats, and KORE1’s insurance IT staffing team can tell you what the market looks like for your block. For the budget case behind a funded project team, what $300K to $500K buys without adding headcount works through a similar four-person example. Want to compare tapes with someone who has read a few? connect with me on LinkedIn.