- Contractanaut
- Cost of hiring
What a US hire really costs, line by line. And what the same seat costs with us.
Salary is the number on the offer letter. It is not the number on your P&L. Pick a role below and the calculator adds employer taxes, health insurance, retirement, workers' comp, recruiting and equipment, each one from a dated primary source. Then it puts a Contractanaut seat next to it. Change any assumption you disagree with.
| Line item | US hire | Contractanaut |
|---|---|---|
| Year one total |
Seat rates are starting prices for full-time, dedicated seats and vary with seniority and market. Recruiting is a first-year cost; from year two the US total drops by that amount. Nothing here is tax or legal advice.
How to read the number
Most "true cost of an employee" pages give you one multiplier and stop. We built the calculator instead, because the multiplier moves depending on who you're hiring. Health insurance, unemployment tax, recruiting and equipment are flat dollar amounts. They don't scale with salary. So they weigh far more on a $45,000 customer service seat than on an $84,000 accountant.
With the defaults above (single health coverage at a small firm, a 4.7% retirement contribution, average recruiting cost, a laptop and software, no office), a bookkeeper at the national median comes out at about 1.43 times salary in year one. An executive assistant comes out at 1.33. An accountant at 1.31. Switch to family coverage and the bookkeeper jumps to roughly 1.62. Every one of those inputs is on the left, and you should change the ones that don't match your business.
Two numbers to keep in mind while you do. The Bureau of Labor Statistics measured employer costs in June 2026 and found that for private-industry office and administrative staff, benefits are 31.3% of total compensation, and insurance alone is 11.0%. For establishments with 1 to 99 workers, benefits are 26.3%, because small firms offer less. Our defaults land between those two, which is where a 15-person company that offers health coverage actually sits.
Role by role, at the national median
Year-one cost with the calculator's default settings, next to the starting rate for the same seat with us. Salaries are national medians from the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for May 2025, published in May 2026. Your city may be higher. Half the people in these jobs earn more than the median.
| Role | US median salary | US year one, loaded | Contractanaut, per year | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bookkeeper, AP/ARSOC 43-3031 | $50,670 | $72,506 1.43× | from $33,600 | $38,906 · 54% |
| Staff accountantSOC 13-2011 | $83,680 | $109,804 1.31× | from $33,600 | $76,204 · 69% |
| Executive assistantSOC 43-6011 | $76,590 | $101,793 1.33× | from $28,800 | $72,993 · 72% |
| Administrative assistantSOC 43-6014 | $47,540 | $68,969 1.45× | from $28,800 | $40,169 · 58% |
| Office manager, ops coordinatorSOC 43-1011 | $69,500 | $93,782 1.35× | from $30,000 | $63,782 · 68% |
| Customer service representativeSOC 43-4051 | $44,770 | $65,840 1.47× | from $30,000 | $35,840 · 54% |
| DispatcherSOC 43-5032 | $50,340 | $72,133 1.43× | from $30,000 | $42,133 · 58% |
| Sales development representativeRepVue median base | $60,000 | $83,048 1.38× | from $30,000 | $53,048 · 64% |
| Medical office coordinatorSOC 43-6013 | $45,930 | $67,150 1.46× | from $30,000 | $37,150 · 55% |
| Insurance CSR, policy processingSOC 43-9041 | $49,230 | $70,879 1.44× | from $30,000 | $40,879 · 58% |
| Software developerSOC 15-1252 | $135,980 | $168,898 1.24× | Scoped on the call | Depends on the brief |
Engineering isn't in the calculator because we don't publish a starting rate for it. A developer seat is scoped and priced in writing after the call, within a day, because the range between a junior React developer and a senior ML engineer is too wide for one "from" number to mean anything.
Want the number for your exact role?
Bring the posting to a 20-minute call. We'll tell you the seat rate in writing, and show you three people who can start next week.
Where the "1.25 to 1.4 times salary" rule comes from
Nearly every article on this subject cites the same range and attributes it to MIT. The source is a column by Joe Hadzima, a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan, written for the Boston Business Journal. Most pages link to an MIT URL that no longer exists. The article is still online at a different MIT address, and it is worth reading, because two things get dropped every time it's quoted.
First, the 1.25 to 1.4 range covers salary, employment taxes and benefits only. The column says so explicitly, and then goes on to add space, equipment and recruiting as separate costs. Pages that present 1.4× as the fully loaded figure are stopping halfway through the article.
Second, the same column relays an estimate from an engineering-services entrepreneur who gets to 2.7 times salary once rent, equipment, management time and non-billable hours are in. That figure is for a consulting business and the article itself says it won't fit every company. But it's in there, and nobody quotes it.
Line by line, what we count and why
Base salary
The national median for the occupation, from the BLS. We use the median rather than the mean because a few high earners drag the mean up. If you're hiring in Austin, Denver or the Bay Area, type in what your last offer letter said.
Social Security and Medicare
The employer pays 6.2% of wages up to the Social Security wage base ($184,500 in 2026) and 1.45% on all wages for Medicare. The 0.9% Additional Medicare Tax above $200,000 is employee-only, so it isn't in your column.
Unemployment insurance
Federal unemployment tax is 6% of the first $7,000, less a 5.4% credit in most states, so $42 per employee per year. California employers lost part of that credit for 2025 and pay $126. State unemployment tax varies by state and by your claims history. We use the national average effective rate on total wages published by the Department of Labor, 0.39%, which is about $200 on a $50,000 salary. New employers in Texas, Florida and California pay in the same neighbourhood on their first $7,000 to $9,000 of wages.
Health insurance
The 2025 KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey puts the average annual premium at $9,325 for single coverage and $26,993 for family. At firms with 10 to 199 workers, workers pay 16% of the single premium and 36% of the family premium, which leaves the employer paying roughly $7,737 and $17,165. Those are the calculator's two options. If you don't offer coverage, and 41% of firms under 200 workers don't, pick "Not offered" and the line goes to zero. It's the single biggest item after salary and the reason a $45,000 seat can cost as much loaded as a $52,000 one somewhere else.
Retirement
Vanguard's How America Saves 2026 report puts the average employer contribution at 4.7% of pay, an all-time high. That average comes from plans Vanguard administers, which skew larger. Only 59% of establishments under 100 workers offer a retirement plan at all, so the slider goes to zero.
Workers' compensation
Rates are set by state and class code. For clerical office staff (class 8810) broker-published rates run from about $0.10 to $0.50 per $100 of payroll. We use $0.25. It's the smallest line on the page and we say so.
Recruiting
SHRM's 2025 benchmarking puts the average cost per non-executive hire at $5,475 and the median time to fill at 44 days. The median cost per hire in an earlier SHRM report was far lower, $1,244, because most small-company hires never touch an agency. If you use one, a contingency fee of 20% on a $50,670 bookkeeper is $10,134, roughly double the average. The calculator uses the average and counts it once, in year one. Untick it if you hire from your own network.
Equipment and software
A $1,500 laptop over three years plus around $1,500 a year in seats (email, phone, the tools of the role). Managed IT for a 10 to 49 person company runs $125 to $175 per seat per month on top of that, which we've left out.
Office space
Off by default. CBRE's Q2 2026 average asking rent is $37.58 per square foot and their 2026 workplace survey puts density at 158 square feet per person, which is about $5,900 a year per desk. If your team is in the office, turn it on.
What we deliberately leave out
Paid time off. A US employee gets about 26 paid days off a year (11 vacation, 8 holidays, 7 sick, per the BLS National Compensation Survey for March 2025). That's already inside the salary. You're paying for 2,080 hours and getting roughly 1,872 worked. Several popular calculators add PTO on top of salary as a cash line, which counts it twice. We don't.
Turnover and ramp-up. Gallup's estimate for replacing someone runs from half to twice their annual salary, and the Work Institute's is 33% of base. Those ranges are too wide to put in a total without looking like we stacked the deck. They're real costs. They're just not calculator material.
Management time. Somebody trains the new person, reviews their work, and covers the desk when they're out. That is the cost our AI layer exists to shrink, but we're not going to put a dollar figure on it here.
The weeks before day one. SHRM's median time to fill is 44 days. The calculator starts the clock on the first day of work. The month and a half where the posting is up and someone on your team is doing two jobs isn't in either column. On our recent placements the brief-to-first-day time has been four to seven days, and that gap is most of the reason people call us.
What the Contractanaut seat includes, and what it doesn't
The right-hand column is the starting monthly rate times twelve. Nothing is added to it because nothing else is charged. The rate covers the person's pay, the headhunting, the contracting, the payroll on their side, the weekly availability check before you ever meet them, the AI training before day one, and the replacement guarantee whose four conditions are published. The first month is charged on the start date, not before.
What it doesn't include: the seats in your own software (the person logs in to your systems, on their own equipment), and any commission you choose to pay a sales seat. It also doesn't include the things you keep doing yourself, like deciding what the role is. We write the brief with you on the call, but you still have to know what you want done.
One honest caveat. A US employee at the median for their occupation and a headhunted seat from us are both full-time, dedicated people, but they are not identical. Ours work remotely, on your hours, from the Philippines, Latin America, Eastern Europe or South Africa depending on the role. If the job needs someone physically in your office, or a US licence, the comparison doesn't apply. If it's a job done on a laptop, on the phone and in your systems, it does. Our pricing section has the starting rates by lane, and the availability board shows who confirmed this week without a call.
Questions people ask about this
How much does it cost to hire a bookkeeper in the US in 2026?
The national median salary for a bookkeeper is $50,670 (BLS, May 2025 data, released May 2026). Add employer Social Security and Medicare, unemployment insurance, the employer share of single health coverage at a small firm, a 4.7% 401(k) contribution, workers' compensation, average recruiting cost and equipment, and the first year comes to roughly $72,500, about 1.43 times salary. Family coverage takes it to about $82,000.
What multiplier should I use for the true cost of an employee?
There is no single number. The often-quoted 1.25 to 1.4 times salary comes from an MIT Sloan column by Joe Hadzima and covers only salary, employment taxes and benefits, before space, equipment and recruiting. Because health insurance, unemployment tax and recruiting are flat dollar amounts, the multiplier is higher for lower-paid roles: about 1.45 for a $47,000 administrative assistant and about 1.31 for an $84,000 accountant, on first-year costs with single health coverage.
How much does employer health insurance cost per employee?
In the 2025 KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey, the average annual premium was $9,325 for single coverage and $26,993 for family coverage. At firms with 10 to 199 workers, the employer's share works out to roughly $7,737 for single coverage and $17,165 for family coverage after the worker's contribution. Only 59% of firms under 200 workers offer coverage at all.
What does a Contractanaut seat cost?
Full-time, dedicated seats start from $2,400 a month for executive and virtual assistants, from $2,500 for operations, admin and sales development roles, and from $2,800 for finance and accounting. The rate covers the person, the headhunting, the contracting, the payroll and the replacement guarantee. Nothing is charged until the person's first day. Engineering seats are scoped and priced on the call.
Does the calculator include paid time off?
Not as a cash cost, because it already sits inside the salary. A US employee averages about 26 paid days off a year (11 vacation, 8 holidays, 7 sick, BLS March 2025), which means you pay for 2,080 hours and get about 1,872. Adding it again on top of salary would double count it, which several popular calculators do.
Is the person a contractor or an employee?
Contractanaut contracts and pays the person. You receive one monthly invoice from us for a dedicated, full-time seat that works your hours. You do not run a foreign payroll or an entity. Classification rules differ by country and we review them per market before placing anyone there.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure above was read from the source on 17 September 2026. Where a number is derived (for example the employer share of a premium), the arithmetic is shown. Items marked "secondary" were read from a reputable secondary source because the primary page blocked automated access; we'll re-check them against the primary before the next update. New data we're waiting on: the BLS Employee Benefits release for March 2026 (due 25 September 2026), the KFF 2026 survey (October) and the IRS list of 2026 FUTA credit-reduction states (November).
- 01Wages: BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, released 15 May 2026, national cross-industry medians by SOC code. bls.gov/oes
- 02SDR base salary: RepVue, median SDR base $60,000 and median OTE $85,000, updated 16 September 2026. repvue.com
- 03Employer costs split: BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026, released 9 September 2026, Tables 4 and 6. bls.gov/news.release/ecec
- 04Social Security and Medicare rates: statutory. 2026 wage base $184,500, announced by SSA 24 October 2025; read via The Tax Adviser (secondary). thetaxadviser.com
- 05FUTA: IRS Instructions for Form 940 and 2025 Schedule A (California credit reduction). irs.gov/instructions/i940
- 06State unemployment: US Department of Labor, ETA, average employer contribution rate, CY2025 estimate, 0.39% of total wages. oui.doleta.gov
- 07Health premiums and worker contributions: KFF Employer Health Benefits Survey 2025, Summary of Findings. Employer share derived: $9,211 × 84% = $7,737 (single) and $26,054 − $8,889 = $17,165 (family), firms with 10 to 199 workers. Note KFF changed its survey frame in 2025 to firms with 10+ workers. kff.org
- 08Retirement: Vanguard, How America Saves 2026 (2025 plan year), average employer contribution 4.7% of pay. vanguard.com. Plan access by establishment size: BLS Employee Benefits in the United States, March 2025. bls.gov
- 09Workers' compensation: national all-class median $1.09 per $100 from the Oregon DCBS 2024 premium rate ranking; clerical class 8810 range $0.10 to $0.50 from broker rate guides (secondary). oregon.gov
- 10Recruiting: SHRM 2025 Benchmarking Reports, average cost per non-executive hire $5,475; SHRM Talent Access Report, median time to fill 44 days, median cost per hire $1,244. shrm.org
- 11Paid leave: BLS National Compensation Survey, March 2025, average vacation, holiday and sick days, private industry. bls.gov
- 12Office space: CBRE Q2 2026 US Office Market Report, average asking rent $37.58 per sq ft; CBRE 2026 Global Workplace and Occupancy Insights, 158 sq ft per person (secondary). cbre.com
- 13The 1.25 to 1.4 rule: Joe Hadzima, "How Much Does an Employee Cost?", MIT, undated column. nutsandbolts.mit.edu
- 14Turnover: Gallup, "This Fixable Problem Costs U.S. Businesses $1 Trillion"; Work Institute Retention Report (secondary, not used in the calculator).
- 15Contractanaut seat rates: our pricing section, starting rates for full-time dedicated seats, and our published guarantee conditions.
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