Why the salary is never the real number
When you budget for a hire on the base salary alone, you undercount the real cost by 20 to 30 percent. The salary is just the starting point. On top of it sit superannuation, payroll tax, workers compensation, and the on-costs almost nobody adds up: software seats, a laptop, training, the time it took to recruit them.
An $80,000 salary usually costs closer to $100,000 once it is all in, and this employee cost calculator shows you where the extra goes. Knowing the real figure changes how you think about pricing, hiring, and whether a task is better handled by a person or a system.
What goes into the true cost
- Superannuation: 12% of ordinary earnings from 1 July 2025, paid on top of salary.
- Payroll tax: a state tax that only applies once your total wages pass the state threshold. Under it, this is zero. The rate and threshold differ in every state.
- Workers compensation: insurance premium set by your industry's risk rating.
- On-costs: everything else: equipment, software, phone, training, recruitment fees, and the desk they sit at.
Person or system?
Once you can see the true hourly cost of a role, the automation question gets sharper. If a person is spending a third of a $100,000 role on repetitive admin, that is real money going into work a system could do for a fraction of it. Compare the number here against your charge-out rate and what you could save with our automation ROI calculator.
The aim is to keep your people and stop paying skilled staff to do the boring parts. Workvolve builds the automations and AI agents that take repetitive admin off your team, so the expensive hours go into work that needs a person. Everything is built in your own accounts, and you own all of it.
