Free Employee Cost Calculator (Excel)

What's in the employee cost calculator

The template is a single Employee Cost table with a row per employee or role, sized for up to 50 rows. For each one you enter base annual pay, a payroll tax percentage, annual benefits cost, annual overhead cost, and hours worked per year.

From those five inputs, the sheet calculates the fully burdened cost, the burden multiplier, and the true hourly rate — the numbers you actually need for pricing, budgeting, or deciding whether a new hire is affordable.

A chart plots burdened cost by employee so you can see, at a glance, which roles are the biggest drivers of total labor cost across your team.

What calculates automatically

Burdened cost adds base pay, the payroll tax percentage applied to base pay, benefits, and overhead into one total the moment you fill in a row. The burden multiplier divides that total by base pay, so you immediately see it as a factor — 1.3x, 1.4x — rather than just a dollar figure.

True hourly rate divides the burdened cost by annual hours, which is the number to use whenever you're comparing an employee's cost to what you're billing clients or budgeting per project, rather than comparing against their base salary.

Why base salary understates the real cost

A rule of thumb worth knowing before you start entering numbers: fully-burdened cost typically runs 1.25x to 1.4x base salary once payroll taxes, benefits, and overhead are added in. If you've been budgeting or pricing off base salary alone, this calculator will usually show a materially higher true cost per employee.

This matters most when you're deciding whether to add headcount, quoting a project that depends on labor cost, or comparing the cost of an employee against a contractor rate that already includes their own overhead.

Comparing true cost across your team

Because every employee gets their own row with the same five inputs, you can line up your whole team — or every role you're budgeting for — and compare burdened cost, multiplier, and true hourly rate side by side rather than running the calculation once per person in a separate sheet.

The summary total for burdened payroll and the average burden multiplier give you a fast sanity check on total labor cost before you commit to a budget or a new hire.