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True Cost of an Employee (Australia)
A salary is never the real cost. Add super, payroll tax, workers comp and on-costs to see what a hire actually costs you per year, month and hour.
The role
The real cost
A guide only. Payroll tax rates and thresholds vary by state, and workers comp depends on your industry. Check with your accountant.
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. 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 point is not to replace people. It is to stop paying skilled staff to do the boring parts. Workvolve builds automations that take the repetitive admin off your team so the expensive hours go into work that actually needs a human.