What does one hire really cost?
A job offer is written as one number, and almost nobody budgets for the other ones. Employer payroll taxes, benefits, a laptop and software seats, the cost of finding the person, the hours your team spends training them, and the months before they are fully up to speed are all part of what the hire costs — and none of them appear in the salary figure.
This calculator adds them up for any role, from your own figures, and shows every step of the arithmetic so you can check it rather than trust it. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent anywhere.
Any role — bookkeeper, sales rep, warehouse packer. Only used to label the result.
Example: 40 for full-time. Change it for part-time.
Example figure — use what you would actually pay.
On top of pay, every month
Example only — this varies a lot by country and state, and sometimes by wage band. Check your own rate.
Example: health cover, pension, paid leave accrual. Enter 0 if none.
Example: laptop spread over its life, phone, seats in the tools they need.
One-time, in the first year
Example: job ads, screening time, any agency fee.
Example: other people's time spent getting them started.
Example: what an hour of your own or your team's time is worth.
Ramp-up
Example: 3. Simple roles are quicker, specialised ones slower.
Example: 60% means they do about three-fifths of the work in that period while being paid in full.
True monthly cost — Customer support
$4,183.33
Pay, employer payroll cost, benefits and tools. One-time costs are listed separately below, because they land once rather than every month.
First year, all in
$52,400.00
Cost per productive hour
$27.99
More than pay alone
$10,800.00 (+26.0%)
How that was worked out
Pay
- Paid hours a year40.0 hrs/week x 52 weeks
- 2,080.0 hrs
- Pay for the year$20.00/hr x 2,080.0 hrs
- $41,600.00
- Pay a month$41,600.00 / 12 months
- $3,466.67
Monthly costs on top of pay
- Employer payroll taxes & contributions10.0% of $3,466.67
- $346.67
- Benefitsas entered
- $250.00
- Equipment & softwareas entered
- $120.00
- True monthly costpay + payroll + benefits + equipment
- $4,183.33
One-time costs
- Recruitingas entered
- $1,200.00
- Onboarding & training25.0 hrs x $40.00/hr
- $1,000.00
- One-time totalrecruiting + onboarding
- $2,200.00
First year
- Twelve months of recurring cost$4,183.33 x 12
- $50,200.00
- Plus the one-time costs+ $2,200.00
- $52,400.00
What the first year actually buys
- Productive months in year one3.0 months at 60.0% + 9.0 months at 100%
- 10.8 mo
- Productive hours in year onethose months x 173.3 hrs/month
- 1,872.0 hrs
- Cost per productive hour$52,400.00 / 1,872.0 hrs
- $27.99
Against pay alone
- First year above the pay figure$52,400.00 - $41,600.00
- $10,800.00
- As a percentage of pay$10,800.00 / $41,600.00
- +26.0%
These are estimates built from the figures you entered, not tax or legal advice. Employer payroll taxes, contributions and benefit costs vary by country, state and role, and the rates above are examples rather than anybody’s actual rates — check your own before you budget against them. Nothing you type here is stored or sent anywhere.
Another way to cover support
Support is one of the few roles you can cover without hiring, so it is worth knowing what the alternative looks like before you commit to the figures above.
- Voiyada Starter — $100/month flat
- AI answers your customers around the clock. Anything complex is routed to the owner’s inbox, so you handle the hard ones and nothing else.
- Voiyada Growth — dedicated VA + 24/7 AI support, from $1,400+/month
- A dedicated human agent takes the complex tickets instead of you, with the AI still answering everything routine. It typically costs less than a full-time US hire. Hours and rates are explained on the call.
What makes a hire cost more than the salary
There are five additions, and they behave differently from each other. Employer payroll taxes and contributions scale with pay, so they rise every time you raise the rate. Benefits and equipment are mostly flat per person per month — health cover, pension contributions, a laptop spread over the years you will use it, a phone line, a seat in every tool the role touches. Recruiting and onboarding are one-time: they hit in the first year and then stop, which is why a monthly figure and a first-year figure are different questions and this page answers both.
Onboarding is the one most often left out entirely, because it is not an invoice. It is other people's hours — yours, usually, plus whoever shows them the systems. Those hours are real cost whether or not anybody books them anywhere, and the calculator asks for them as hours times what an hour of that time is worth, because that is the only honest way to price something nobody sends you a bill for.
Which of these actually apply depends on where you are and how you hire. An employer in one country pays contributions another does not; a contractor arrangement moves several of these off your side of the ledger entirely. That is why every rate above is an editable example rather than a built-in assumption — the figures that matter here are yours, not ours.
Why ramp-up changes the real hourly cost
A new hire is paid in full from their first day but is not fully productive on it. For the first stretch they are learning the product, the systems and the edge cases, and some of their output is being checked by somebody else. You are buying fewer productive hours in year one than you are paying for.
That gap is what the cost-per-productive-hour figure captures, and it is the number that makes a hire comparable to anything else that could do the same work. Pay divided by hours tells you the rate; first-year cost divided by productive hours tells you what the work actually costs you to have done. The two can be a long way apart in the first year, and they converge once the ramp is over.
Only you can estimate the ramp honestly, which is why both figures are yours to set. A role with a short script and clear rules is productive quickly. One that needs product knowledge, judgement calls or a relationship with your customers takes longer. If you are not sure, run it twice with different numbers and see how much the answer actually moves — that tells you whether the estimate is worth agonising over.
What to do with the number
The useful comparison is not salary against salary. It is first-year cost against the cost of every other way of getting the same work done — a part-timer, a contractor, an agency, software, or not doing the work at all. Those options have their own hidden costs, but they are different hidden costs, and comparing a fully loaded figure against someone else's headline rate is how budgets go wrong in the other direction.
It is also worth running the calculator twice: once at the pay you would like to offer, and once at the pay you would need to offer to actually fill the role. The second number is the one you will be living with.
Frequently asked questions
What counts as the true cost of an employee?
Their pay, plus employer payroll taxes and contributions, plus benefits, plus equipment and software, plus the one-time cost of recruiting and onboarding them, adjusted for the fact that they are not fully productive while they are learning the job. This calculator asks for each of those separately rather than applying a single multiplier to salary, because the components behave differently: some scale with pay, some are flat per person, and some only happen once.
What percentage should I enter for employer payroll taxes?
Whatever your jurisdiction actually charges, which this calculator has no way of knowing. Employer-side rates differ by country, often by state or province, sometimes by wage band, and the mix of what counts as a tax versus a mandatory contribution differs too. The default above is an example to show the shape of the calculation, not a rate for anywhere in particular — your accountant or your payroll provider can give you the real one.
Does this work for part-time or contract roles?
Yes, for part-time: set the hours per week to what you are actually hiring for and everything downstream follows from it. For contractors it depends on your arrangement. Several of these costs typically sit with the contractor rather than with you, so set the ones that do not apply to zero — commonly the payroll percentage and benefits, and often equipment.
How do I estimate months to full productivity?
Think about when you would stop checking their work, and when you would be comfortable leaving them to it for a week. Simple, rule-based roles get there in weeks; roles that need product knowledge or judgement take months. If you genuinely cannot guess, try a short ramp and a long one and see how much the per-hour figure moves — if the answer barely changes, the estimate was not worth worrying about.
Why is the first-year cost higher than twelve times the monthly cost?
Because recruiting and onboarding are one-time costs that land in the first year and then stop. The monthly figure is what the role costs you on an ongoing basis; the first-year figure adds the cost of starting it. In the second year, with no recruiting or onboarding and no ramp-up, the two line up.
Is this tax or legal advice?
No. It is arithmetic on the figures you type in. Tax rates, mandatory contributions, benefit requirements and employment rules vary by country and by state, and they change. Treat the result as an estimate for planning and check anything you are going to budget or file against with a professional who knows your jurisdiction.
Is anything I type here saved or sent anywhere?
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser, there is no signup, and the numbers never leave your device — there is no request in the page that could send them.
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