Why this page has no default rates
Almost every input here is blank on purpose. The employer share of payroll taxes, the unemployment rate you are assigned, the wage base it applies up to, the workers compensation rate for the class code your employee falls under, what a health plan costs where you are — none of these are one number. They vary by state, by industry, by your own claims history, by the plan you chose and by the year. Any figure printed here as a default would be wrong for most of the people reading it, and wrong in a direction they could not see.
So the honest version is a calculator that does the adding while you supply the rates. Your payroll provider can tell you the employer tax figure for a specific employee in one report. Your state workforce agency sends an annual notice with your unemployment rate and the wage base. Your workers compensation policy shows the rate per hundred dollars of payroll for each class code, and your experience modifier alongside. The plan quote gives the health number. Twenty minutes of gathering, and the answer is yours rather than a national average.
The shape of the total
Even without asserting rates, the structure is worth understanding, because it tells you which inputs move the answer.
| Component | Scales with | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Employer payroll tax | All wages, some parts capped | Payroll provider report |
| Unemployment insurance | Wages up to a base, then stops | State agency notice and federal filing |
| Workers compensation | Payroll, by class code | Insurance policy declarations |
| Health contribution | Flat per month, not the wage | Plan quote |
| Retirement match | Wages, up to plan limits | Your own plan design |
| Paid time off | Days off, for hourly staff | Your policy |
The capped items matter more than people expect at the bottom of the wage range. Unemployment insurance typically stops at a wage base, so it is a meaningful percentage of a $30,000 wage and a rounding error on a $150,000 one. The flat items work the same way in reverse: a fixed monthly health contribution is a large fraction of a low wage and a small one of a high wage. This is why a single burden percentage carried across a whole payroll misstates both ends.
Paid time off, and why it only counts once
For someone paid by the hour, a paid holiday is genuinely extra: you pay for a day and get no hours. Entering the days adds that pay to the total and leaves it out of the hours you divide by, so the fully loaded hourly figure reflects what an hour of actual work costs.
For a salaried employee it is different. The salary is the same whether or not the week is taken, so counting the days again would be double counting. What time off costs a salaried role is coverage and output, and neither is a payroll line. That is why the field is ignored in salary mode rather than silently added.
Costs that never appear on a payroll report
The other column belongs to things you pay for because the person exists rather than because of the wage: equipment and the software seat, the phone, the uniform, training and licensing, the payroll processing fee itself, and the cost of hiring spread over how long you expect them to stay. Recruiting is the one most often left out, and if a role turns over every eighteen months it is not small. Put a monthly figure in the other costs box and it flows through the same way.
Once you have a real total, the number to carry forward is the fully loaded hourly cost, because that is what you price work against. Quoting a job at the wage rate and paying the total is how a busy shop stays busy and does not make money — the break-even calculator takes this figure straight into the payroll line.
Questions people ask
Is there a rule of thumb multiple of the wage?
People quote figures in the range of 1.15 to 1.4 times the wage, and you will see wider claims than that. Treat any of them as a way to sanity-check your own arithmetic rather than a substitute for it, because the multiple depends almost entirely on the wage level and on how much health cover you provide. A fixed monthly health contribution on a low wage can push the multiple far above the usual quoted range, and a high salary with capped taxes and no benefits sits below it. Run your own rates and you will know which end you are at.
Where do I find my workers compensation rate?
On the declarations page of the policy. It is normally quoted as a dollar rate per hundred dollars of payroll for each class code, which converts to a percentage by dividing by one hundred — a rate of 1.50 per hundred is 1.5 percent of payroll. Your experience modifier multiplies it. If one employee does work that falls under more than one class code, your carrier or broker can tell you how the payroll is split, and the split matters, because rates between codes can differ by an order of magnitude.
Does this handle overtime?
Not directly. The simplest approach is to enter the total paid hours including the overtime premium as an effective figure: if someone works 45 hours a week with five of them at time and a half, that is 47.5 straight-time-equivalent hours, so enter 47.5 in the hours field. Every percentage-based employer cost then applies to the right payroll figure, since payroll taxes and workers compensation are generally assessed on the wages actually paid, overtime included.
Can I use this to decide between a contractor and an employee?
It gives you one side of the comparison — what the employed route costs in cash. It cannot tell you whether the role is legally classifiable as contract work, and that is not a judgement to make from a calculator. Worker classification is tested against the actual working relationship, not the label on the invoice, and getting it wrong is expensive in back taxes and penalties. Use the number to compare rates and take the classification question to someone qualified to answer it.