Where the numbers come from

What a local hire costs

Four things, added together.

• The wage. The national average hourly wage for that occupation, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics occupational survey, May 2025. Executive assistant $28.93. Marketing associate $43.03. General administrative, which we use for a custom role, $23.43.
• Benefits and payroll tax. Thirty cents in every dollar an employer spends on a private sector worker goes to benefits rather than wages. That is the Bureau of Labor Statistics employer cost report, June 2026. So the real cost of an hour is the wage divided by 0.70.
• A laptop and a monitor. Fifty dollars a month. Eighteen hundred dollars spread over three years.
• Software seats and a phone line. Seventy five dollars a month.
• Finding and hiring them. Eighty six dollars a month. The widely cited average cost per hire is $4,129, spread over four years.

The last three are ours, not published figures, and they are deliberately modest. They also do not scale with hours, because a ten hour hire still needs a laptop. That is why a smaller engagement saves proportionally more.

What we cost

Thirteen dollars per hour worked, and nothing else. Twenty hours a week is $260 a week. Billing is weekly, so a month is fifty two weeks divided by twelve, which makes twenty hours about $1,127 a month.

What we left out on purpose

All of these are real costs of hiring locally and none of them are in the comparison, which makes the gap we show smaller than the true one.

• Office space, or the share of it one person occupies
• The time you spend managing a hire, and the time you spend interviewing
• Cover when they are away, and the cost of the work not happening
• What it costs when somebody leaves after eight months and you start again

Worked example

An executive assistant at twenty hours a week.

• $28.93 divided by 0.70 is $41.33 an hour to the employer
• $41.33 times 20 hours times 4.3333 weeks is $3,582 a month
• Plus $211 of equipment, software and hiring, so $3,793
• Through us, $1,127
• You save $2,666 a month, which is seventy percent

If you think we are wrong

Tell us. If your real number is different from the published average, and it often is, put your number in and the percentage changes. We would rather the figure was right than flattering.