How much should I pay my employees calculator: a market rate salary calculator for employers

Most small business owners ask the question as if it had one answer. It has three, and you need all of them before you make an offer: the salary you pay, the range you publish, and the total cost you carry. Getting the first right and ignoring the other two is how a company ends up with an offer that looks fair on paper, loses to a larger employer anyway, and then breaks the budget it was supposed to fit.

The builder above handles the first two. It starts from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, which covers roughly 1.1 million establishments and is the largest wage dataset in the country that anybody can read for free. Each role maps to one Standard Occupational Classification code, and the output shows which one, so you can check the source yourself. We explain the survey, including what it leaves out, in our guide to BLS salary data.

The third number is where owners get surprised. Payroll software will tell you the tax on a salary you already chose. It will not tell you that the benefits load at a 30 person company is a different number from the one at a 3,000 person company, or what that difference does to your offer. That is the part this page adds.

Enter the salary you are considering and your company size. The calculator splits the cost into the part the law fixes and the part you choose. Social Security is 6.2 percent of wages up to the 2026 wage base of $184,500, Medicare is 1.45 percent with no cap, and federal unemployment tax is 0.6 percent of the first $7,000 once you take the full state credit, which is $42 a year per employee.

Everything else, from health insurance to paid leave to retirement contributions, comes from the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation survey for June 2026. We use the ratio of benefit cost to wage cost for private employers of your size, which is a better yardstick than the flat 1.25 to 1.4 multiplier that gets quoted for every employer regardless of size.

Two notes on accuracy. First, the BLS ratio is an average across every private employer of a given size, so a company that offers no health plan will run below it and one that pays the full family premium will run above it. Treat the result as the cost of a typical package, then adjust. Second, BLS already counts FICA and unemployment tax inside its legally required benefits line, so the calculator does not add them twice: the tax rows are shown so you can see them, and the total uses the ratio alone.

Here is the part almost no salary calculator shows you. The BLS survey breaks employer costs out by establishment size, and the benefit load climbs steeply with headcount. Divide each size class's benefit cost by its wage cost and you get the number of cents a typical employer of that size spends on benefits for every dollar of salary.

Source: BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026 (USDL-26-1494, released September 9, 2026), tables 4 and 6. Ratios and dollar totals computed by Wagelist.

Read the last column as the cost of the same $80,000 offer with a typical benefits package at each size. The large employer spends about $15,600 more on that hire than a company under 50 does, and the candidate feels most of it: in the BLS breakdown, paid leave runs 14.0 cents per wage dollar at 500 or more workers against 8.4 cents under 50, health and other insurance runs 14.8 cents against 8.4, and retirement runs 7.3 cents against 3.1.

Now run it the other way. If your benefits look like the average firm under 50, what salary matches a big employer's total package on an $80,000 job? Divide $123,588 by 1.350 and you get about $91,500, or 14.4 percent above the market rate. That is the honest answer to why a small company that pays the median keeps losing finalists to a large one that pays the same median. The salary matched. The package did not.