Free Global Hiring Budget Planner

Hiring decisions get compared on the number the candidate hears, because it is the only figure everyone in the conversation has. The employer cost sits somewhere above it and nobody in the room can say where, so the comparison between an employee, a contractor and a managed arrangement happens on three numbers that are not the same kind of number. The cost lands on the decision: a structure gets chosen on a difference sitting inside the margin of error of the assumptions, and the budget holder finds out in month four when the first invoice for something unbudgeted arrives.

The model makes each assumption visible and then applies it linearly. Take comparable pay of $90,000 with employer burden at 15%, benefits at 8% and administration at 5%: the employee line comes to $115,200. A contractor uplift of 12% gives $100,800, and a managed service uplift of 20% gives $108,000. The spread between the cheapest and the dearest is $14,400, which is 16% of the pay figure, so it takes a sixteen point error in the burden assumption alone to move a budget by as much as the whole choice between structures does. That is the reading to take away, because it says where the research effort belongs.

The starter percentages are editable example inputs, and they are not rates for any country. Replace each with a payroll quote, a provider quote or a budget line your finance team recognizes, because the model has no country knowledge to correct you with. It is also linear and annual, so one-off costs sit outside it: recruitment, equipment, the notice period at the end, and the cost of changing structure later. The three lines are not equivalent goods either. One of them carries employment protections that have a value to the worker and a cost to you.