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 an hourly wage or salary into the labor cost 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.
Calculate the labor burden
Inputs stay in your browser — no entered values are sent or stored.
Annualized wage: $74,880 (36 × 40 hours × 52 paid weeks). Paid weeks set the wage basis; PTO is not added again.
Your hourly labor rate
- Base hourly wage
- $36.00
- Employer burden / hour
- $2.92
- Labor burden
- 8.1%
- Fully burdened / hour
- $38.92
Hourly averages use 2,080 paid hours. Annual fully-burdened cost: $80,949.
Changes the itemized breakdown and role budget below; the hourly rate summary stays fixed. Nonannual totals are annualized averages, not payroll-tax deposit timing.
How the $6,069 on top of salary breaks down
- Social Security76%
- Medicare18%
- FUTA1%
- State SUI4%
- Workers' comp1%
| Cost item | Rate or assumption | hourly amount |
|---|---|---|
| Base wages | Annualized average | $36.00 |
| Social Security (employer) | 6.20% up to $184,500 | $2.23 |
| Medicare (employer) | 1.45% (no cap) | $0.52 |
| FUTA | 0.60% on first $7,000 | $0.02 |
| State unemployment (SUI/TX) | 2.70% up to $9,000 | $0.12 |
| Workers' compensation (est.)est. | ~0.08% (office/clerical est.) | $0.03 |
| Total hourly cost | $38.92 |
$74,880 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 $0/year.
Employer-paid costs only — employee withholdings (state income tax, SDI, employee-funded leave) are excluded; these are costs on top of wages, not deductions. Estimate for budgeting, not tax advice. Defaults use the new-employer SUI rate and an office-class workers'-comp estimate. See methodology.
The formula
Labor burden rate (%) = Employer burden costs ÷ Base wages × 100
Fully-burdened labor cost rate ($/hr) = (Base wages + Employer burden costs) ÷ Paid hours
“Employer burden costs” is the stack beyond wages: 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.
Why it matters
Construction and field-service contractors who bid from base wages alone can understate labor cost on every hour. A defensible labor burden rate is one input to pricing, quoting, and headcount planning, especially when workers' comp varies sharply by trade or job class. This result is a labor cost rate, not a customer bill rate; add non-labor overhead and target margin before quoting.
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.