Take the hourly rate off the job posting you already wrote and add roughly 30%. That is the honest answer, and you can do it on the back of an envelope in about a minute.
On a posting at $21 to $26 an hour, that is $43,700 to $54,100 of base salary at 2,080 hours, plus $13,100 to $16,200 of payroll taxes, insurance, paid time off and equipment. Year one lands somewhere between $57,000 and $70,000.
Where the 30% comes from
The fully loaded cost of a salaried US employee generally runs 1.25 to 1.4 times base salary. The components corroborate each other: employer payroll taxes, meaning Social Security, Medicare, FUTA and SUTA, add 7.65% to 10%, and benefits typically add 20% to 40%. We use 30%, the middle of that band, rather than the end that would flatter our own numbers.
What that number leaves out
- —Recruiting time, including the hours you personally spend on interviews
- —The weeks the seat sits open while the work still has to happen
- —Roughly three months of partial output while they learn how your business actually runs
- —The next round, because these roles turn over
Every one of those is real and none of them is in the $57,000 to $70,000. The number is conservative on purpose. If you spot a cost we left out, that makes the case stronger rather than weaker.
The cost nobody puts on the spreadsheet
The salary is the visible number. The expensive part is the cycle: recruit, interview, hire, train for three months, get a productive year, and then watch everything they learned about how your invoices actually work walk out the door with them. Then you write the same job post again.
That is the part worth pricing, because it repeats. Whatever the seat costs in year one, the real question is what it costs every eighteen months, forever.
The Seat Audit exists to answer that question with your own numbers rather than ours. It times every task in the role you are about to fill and sorts what a system should own from what a person should. See how the audit works.