Guide · 2026
Labor burden rate calculator
Your labor burden rate is everything an employee costs you beyond their base wage — payroll taxes, insurance, and benefits — expressed as a percentage of that wage. It turns a salary into the number you actually budget.
Payroll burden, employer burden, fully loaded rate, and loaded labor rate are common names for the same employer-side budgeting task; this calculator itemizes the shared cost stack without creating separate assumptions.
The formula
Labor burden rate (%) = (Total employer costs − Base wages) ÷ Base wages × 100
Fully-burdened labor rate ($/hr) = (Base wages + Employer costs) ÷ Hours worked
“Employer costs” is the burden stack: employer Social Security (6.20% up to $184,500), Medicare (1.45%), federal unemployment (FUTA), state unemployment (SUI), any state-specific employer taxes, workers' compensation, and — if you include them — benefits like health insurance and a retirement match.
At a $60,000 salary, this site's current 51-jurisdiction defaults produce a burden range of 8.0%–10.3% before optional benefits. That build-time range uses new-employer SUI, a total employer headcount of one, and each jurisdiction's office-class workers'-comp estimate. The data set's separate national benefits planning range is 25%–35% of wages; it is an estimate, remains off by default, and should be replaced with the employer's actual costs. The two major state-sensitive inputs are the SUI rate and workers'-comp class — which is why the same salary burdens differently in California than in Texas.
A worked example
Take a $60,000 salary. Under the calculator's Texas defaults, employer taxes plus an office workers'-comp estimate add $4,920 — a labor burden rate of 8.2%, for a fully-burdened cost of $64,920 ($31.21/hour). The same salary under the California defaults carries a 8.6% burden ($65,132). Optional health, retirement, other-benefit, and payroll/PEO costs increase the result only by the values entered in the calculator.
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Calculate the cost
Inputs stay in your browser — no entered values are sent or stored.
How the $6,079 on top of salary breaks down
- Social Security76%
- Medicare18%
- FUTA1%
- State SUI4%
- Workers' comp1%
| Base wages | Annual rate basis | $75,000 |
| Social Security (employer) | 6.20% up to $184,500 | $4,650 |
| Medicare (employer) | 1.45% (no cap) | $1,088 |
| FUTA | 0.60% on first $7,000 | $42 |
| State unemployment (SUI/TX) | 2.70% up to $9,000 | $243 |
| Workers' compensation (est.)est. | ~0.08% (office/clerical est.) | $56 |
| Total annual cost | $81,079 |
$75,000 annualized wages · 2,080 paid hours · Texas · 1 in role · 1 total employer headcount · tax year 2026.
Health $0/year · retirement 0% · other benefits 0% · payroll/PEO fees $0/year.
Employer-paid costs only — employee withholdings (state income tax, SDI, employee-funded leave) are excluded; these are costs on top of wages, not deductions. Estimate for budgeting, not tax advice. Defaults use the new-employer SUI rate and an office-class workers'-comp estimate. See methodology.
Why it matters
Contractors who bid off base wages alone lose money on every hour. A correct labor burden rate is the difference between a job that looks profitable and one that actually is — and it's the basis for pricing, quoting, and headcount planning. Construction and field-service firms especially need it per-trade, because workers' comp swings the burden hard by job class.
See the full model and exclusions in our methodology, the cost in a specific state from the cost-by-state index, or how a W-2 hire compares to a contractor in 1099 vs W-2 employer cost. Every rate is sourced.