Hitman's Agent 47 is the world's premier assassin, a man able to blend in with his surroundings at will, to get within arm's reach of the most secure and often most dangerous people on the planet. For much of his career he's been a man on a mission, but I have recently been wondering how much it would cost to hire him for a single job.
Me being able to entertain this possibility is canon! At the end of Hitman 3 he and Diana essentially go off grid, leaving Providence behind to continue their work together as freelancers. Which I'm assuming doesn't pay as well as a staff job, but if the gig economy has come for us, then it has come for Agent 47 as well.
Like us–and this is one of the only times I can make such a comparison, at least until I get balder–Agent 47 now has to worry about doing his own taxes, quoting for jobs and just generally living the small business hustle. His work pays (presumably) a lot more than ours does, so I’m sure he’ll be fine, but still, the leap from Providence employee to small business owner will be a challenge for him.
Which also means Agent 47's loss could be our gain. Prior to the events of Hitman 3 he only worked in the shadows, the most lethal puppet on a string on the planet, a plaything of the powerful in their struggles against the...also powerful, but slightly more evil. If anyone else needed work done back then we'd have had to hire an assassin out of the phonebook, or Facebook Marketplace, or the dark web, or know a guy who knew a guy, all of which were just as likely to see us end up in prison as the target whacked.
These days though, Agent 47 is just out there for hire! He could, and presumably would (after repeated quicksaves and reloads, anyway) be able to do any job on the planet provided the pay was right.
Which leads me to wonder: hypothetically speaking, how much would a contract cost? Would Agent 47 charge per kill? Would he charge according to the complexity of the job? Would he scout out the target and present them with a series of quotes, escalating in cost owing to factors like difficulty and comedic value? Would the prospective clients get a certain number of "body in a storage closet" dumps for free, and exceeding that value would result in a surcharge per body?
I’ve seen people ask this before, pointing to contract values from previous games and coming up with ballpark figures. Silent Assassin, released in 2002, has Agent 47 saying his standard rate is $100,000, while 2006’s Blood Money paid between $100,000 and $600,000 per job. That’s a while ago though, and Providence probably took a substantial cut of that, so it doesn’t really help with what his rates would be in 2025, particularly given the inflationary and cost-of-living crisis we’re all currently living through.
And while there are publicly available rates for actual hitmen, I suspect that many of those are based on hitmen who were caught, and who also appear to be at the entry level of this particular market. The mafia hiring a guy to whack another guy outside a deli would not cost the same as a single career professional infiltrating an 18th century mansion, sneaking past 72 guards, hacking a security network and executing a renegade tech mogul.
So yeah, I have no idea how much it would cost to hire Agent 47! I just wonder sometimes, that's all. Please feel free to chime in with your own educated guesses below.
