Labor Burden Calculator
Category: Time-tracking utilities & calculators
Vendor: busybusy
URL: https://busybusy.com/calculators/payroll-calculators/labor-burden/
Overview
Labor Burden Calculator is a free online tool that estimates the true hourly cost of an employee by combining their base wage with payroll taxes and insurance-related overhead. It is designed to help businesses (especially in construction) improve job costing and budgeting by revealing the full hourly labor burden for different labor classifications.
Features
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Total hourly labor cost estimation
- Calculates the full hourly cost of an employee, not just their wage.
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Labor burden breakdown
- Separates base wage from additional burden costs to show:
- Total hourly cost
- Total hourly burden (over-and-above wage)
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Tax components included (with default rates)
- FICA (example default: 7.65%)
- FUTA (example default: 6.0%)
- SUTA (example mid-range example: 3.0%)
- Uses standard example rates for display; actual numbers can be adjusted with your own data.
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Insurance cost components
- General liability insurance rate per $1,000 of payroll.
- Worker’s compensation rate per $100 of payroll.
- Converts these rates into a per-hour dollar cost for each employee classification.
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Supports multiple labor classifications
- Allows you to repeat the calculation for different labor classes (e.g., different trade codes or risk classes) to see the cost per hour for each.
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Step-by-step guided input
- Enter hourly labor rate.
- Use General Liability and Worker’s Compensation declaration pages to find the correct class codes and rates.
- Input GL rate (per $1,000) and WC rate (per $100).
- View resulting per-hour cost and burden.
- Repeat for as many labor classifications as needed.
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Visualization of hidden costs
- Highlights that taxes and insurance add significant cost beyond the stated hourly wage.
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Job costing & budgeting support
- Intended to be used as a tool to improve accuracy of job bids and labor-related budgeting by incorporating full labor burden.
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Review-ready outputs
- Produces a detailed cost breakdown that can be reviewed with an accountant for refinement and validation.
Inputs:
- Hourly labor rate (base wage).
- General liability insurance rate per $1,000 of payroll.
- Worker’s compensation insurance rate per $100 of payroll.
- Applicable payroll tax rates (or use example defaults shown in the calculator).
Outputs (per hour):
- Total hourly cost.
- Total hourly burden (taxes + insurance + other included overhead).
- Individual line items for each included cost type (e.g., FICA, FUTA, SUTA, general liability, worker’s comp).
Pricing
- Free – The Labor Burden Calculator is provided as a free online tool.
