How to Hire Laravel Developers: What to Check Before You Commit

The usual way to hire Laravel developers is to scan CVs for "five years of Laravel", run a quiz about service containers and facades, and pick whoever answers fastest. It filters out beginners, but it tells you very little about the thing you are paying for: whether this person can change a real application safely, without slowing it down or opening a security hole.

This guide is about checking that. It is written for founders and managers who need Laravel work done, whether that means one freelancer, a contract team or a permanent hire, and who may not be developers themselves.

First, be clear about what kind of Laravel work you have

"Laravel developer" covers very different jobs, and the right person for one is not always right for another.

• A new build. You need someone who can design a data model, structure an app so it stays readable as it grows, and set up tests and deployment from the start.
• An existing app that needs features. You need someone comfortable reading other people's code and changing it without breaking what is already there.
• An app on an old version. You need someone who has done upgrades before and knows what tends to break.

That last case is more common than people expect. According to Laravel's release notes and support policy, each major version gets bug fixes for 18 months and security fixes for two years. Laravel 13 came out in March 2026 and needs PHP 8.3 or newer. Laravel 11 stopped receiving security fixes in March 2026, and Laravel 12's bug-fix window closed in August 2026, with security fixes continuing until February 2027. PHP itself has its own clock: the PHP project's support table shows PHP 8.2 losing security support at the end of 2026.

So if your app runs on Laravel 11 or older, or on PHP 8.2, ask every candidate about upgrades, and treat their answer as one of the most important parts of the interview.

What good Laravel code looks like to a non-developer

You do not need to read PHP to run this check. Ask a candidate to walk you through a piece of their own work, or have a developer you trust do it, and listen for these things.

They know where the database time goes

The classic Laravel performance problem is the "N+1" query. Laravel's own documentation gives the example of listing 25 books with their authors: loaded naively it runs 26 database queries, and with eager loading it runs two. A good developer will mention eager loading without prompting, and may switch on Laravel's option that throws an error on lazy loading during development, so these mistakes show up before your customers notice them.

Validation and permissions are not left in the controller

Input rules belong in form request classes, and "who is allowed to do this" belongs in policies or gates. When those checks are scattered through controllers, one gets missed sooner or later. Broken access control, meaning users reaching data or actions they should not, is first on the OWASP Top 10 for 2025, and in Laravel apps it usually starts exactly here.

Slow work happens in the background

Sending emails, generating PDFs and calling slow third-party APIs should run on queues, not while the user waits. Ask how they handle a queued job that fails halfway through. A good answer mentions retries, making the job safe to run twice, and somewhere to see failed jobs.

There are tests

Laravel ships with support for Pest and PHPUnit out of the box, and its documentation recommends that most tests be feature tests that exercise the app as a whole. A developer who never writes tests is asking you to find their bugs for them. Our article on what to test first when budget is tight covers which tests earn their keep.

Secrets stay out of the code

Passwords and API keys belong in environment configuration, and the .env file should never be committed to the repository. Ask how they handle this. It is a quick, telling question.

A paid test task beats a whiteboard interview

The single most useful step is a small, paid task on a realistic codebase. Keep it to four to six hours and pay for it at the candidate's normal rate. Good developers are busy, and unpaid tasks put off exactly the people you want.

Here is a worked example. Give the candidate a small Laravel app with customers, orders and products, and this brief:

Add a way for a customer to cancel an order that has not shipped. Cancelling should return the items to stock and email the customer a confirmation. Only the customer who placed the order, or an admin, can cancel it.

Then look at what comes back:

1. Did they ask anything first? "What about partly shipped orders?" and "Should the email go through a queue?" are good signs. Silence followed by a finished task is not necessarily bad, but questions show judgment.
2. Is the permission rule in a policy? Or is it an if statement buried in the controller?
3. Is the stock update wrapped in a database transaction? If something fails after the order is marked cancelled but before the stock is returned, what state is the data left in?
4. Is the email queued?
5. Are there tests, including one proving a different customer cannot cancel the order?
6. Is the commit history readable? Small, described commits suggest someone who will be easy to work with.

A candidate who gets five of the six right in a few hours is usually a safer choice than one with a longer CV who gets two.

Freelancer, contract team or permanent hire?

The checks above apply to all three, but the risks differ. A single freelancer is often the cheapest way to get a contained feature built, and the riskiest choice for anything your business depends on, because all the knowledge sits in one head. A small contract team costs more per hour but usually brings code review, separate testing and cover for holidays. A permanent hire makes sense once you have a steady stream of Laravel work for years rather than months, and someone senior enough to review their code.

Whichever you choose, the same rule applies: the repository, the servers and the deployment process should be in your company's name and documented well enough that a new developer could pick them up in a day or two.

Interview questions to ask when you hire Laravel developers

Skip the trivia. These questions have no single right answer, which is the point:

• "Tell me about an upgrade you did between major Laravel versions. What broke?"
• "A page takes four seconds to load. How do you find out why?"
• "When would you not use Eloquent?"
• "How do you deploy a change without taking the site down?"
• "What is something in a Laravel codebase you inherited that you would do differently?"

Listen for specifics: tool names, a real mistake they made, a trade-off they weighed. You can read more about how we use the framework on our Laravel technology page.

Warning signs worth taking seriously

• They want to rewrite your application in the first week, before they have understood it.
• Everything lives in controllers and there is no test folder in anything they show you.
• They cannot explain what a queue is for.
• They have only ever worked on one version of Laravel and treat upgrades as someone else's job.
• Their code sample contains real credentials.

One caveat: not every PHP project needs a Laravel specialist. If you have a simple content site, a well-maintained CMS may serve you better. If you have not yet settled on the framework, our comparison of Laravel and Node.js for business apps may help first.

Before your next interview, write down which of the three kinds of Laravel work you actually have, check which Laravel and PHP versions your app runs on, and prepare the paid test task. Those three steps will shape every conversation that follows.

If you would like to assess our Laravel development team the same way, send us the cancel-an-order task or a real piece of your own backlog. An engagement with us can also start with one paid milestone, so you see real work before committing further.