Free tool
Employee cost estimator
What a hire actually costs, not what the offer letter says. You name every employer cost line and value it yourself, in any currency, and the tool adds them up.
Pay figures are sensitive. The link carries them in the address itself, so think before you paste it anywhere shared.
Where the cost comes from
| Line | Per month | Per year | Share of total |
|---|---|---|---|
| The breakdown appears here once your figures are in. | |||
How the total is worked out
Every step, in the open, so you can rebuild the model on one spreadsheet tab and disagree with it if you want to. A calculator you cannot check is an ad.
Gross pay first, and what percentages are applied to
Gross pay is annualised first: a monthly figure is multiplied by twelve, an annual figure is taken as entered. Variable pay is a percentage of that gross base and is added to it, and the result is the figure that percentage-based employer cost lines are applied to. That choice matters and is worth stating: if a contribution in your country is calculated on base pay only, or is capped above a ceiling, enter it as a fixed amount rather than a percentage, because this tool applies percentages to gross pay including variable and applies no ceilings at all.
Each line added exactly as you defined it
An employer cost line is a percentage of gross pay, a fixed monthly amount, or a fixed annual amount, whichever you chose. Benefits and other recurring costs are monthly amounts, annualised by twelve. One-off costs, equipment and recruitment, are divided by the number of months you chose and added as a monthly share; in cash terms you pay them once, usually before the person starts, so treat that line as a budgeting convention rather than a payment schedule.
The multiplier, and the cost per hour
The multiplier is the total annual cost divided by the gross base pay, so it reads 1.00 when nothing has been added and rises as you fill the rows in. Cost per hour is the total annual cost divided by hours per week multiplied by weeks per year. Both of those are your inputs: reduce the weeks to account for leave and public holidays if you want a cost per hour actually worked rather than a cost per hour paid.
What this tool does not know
Any employer contribution rate, ceiling, threshold or exemption in any country. It does not know whether a contribution applies to variable pay, whether it stops above a salary ceiling, whether a small employer is treated differently, or whether your industry carries a levy that most do not. It does not compute anyone's net pay, it is not payroll, and it is not tax or legal advice.
It is also not a classification tool: read contractor versus employee before you use a cost comparison to decide how to engage someone. For the country-by-country shape of hiring, the guides cover several markets. Capstan does not compute statutory payroll: it compiles your inputs and hands a documented export to your payroll partner, who does the statutory maths.
Questions with complete answers
Why are the employer contribution rows empty?
Because we will not publish employer contribution rates as fact. They differ by country, and inside some countries by region, by industry, by the size of the employer and by the salary band the person falls into, and they change. A tool that shipped with a number in that field would be confidently wrong for most readers and would look authoritative while being so. Ask your accountant or check the official source for the country you are hiring in, enter what they give you, and the arithmetic here will show you exactly what it did with it.
What does the multiplier mean?
It is the total cost divided by the gross base pay. A multiplier of 1.30 means every unit of salary costs you 1.30 units once everything else is counted. It is the single most useful figure here for planning, because it lets you sanity-check a hiring budget without rebuilding the whole sum for each role, and because it makes the gap between salary and cost visible at a glance. It is only as good as the lines you entered.
Does this work for hiring in any country?
Yes, and that is the point of building it this way. There is nothing country-specific in the arithmetic: you choose the currency, you choose the number format, and every local cost is a row you name and value yourself. The same page works whether you are hiring in Germany, Nigeria, Indonesia, Singapore, the United Kingdom, the United States or anywhere else, because the tool never pretends to know the local rules.
Can I use this to decide between hiring an employee and engaging a contractor?
Not on cost alone, and it is worth saying plainly. Whether someone can be a contractor is a legal question about how the working relationship actually operates, and it is not answered by which arrangement is cheaper. Comparing the two totals and choosing the lower one is precisely how misclassification happens, and it tends to surface in an audit or a dispute, when it is most expensive to fix. Read the classification guide, then take the specific case to a qualified professional.
Is this tax advice, or payroll?
Neither. It is a budgeting aid that adds up the figures you give it. It states no rate, no threshold and no filing date, it does not compute anyone's net pay, and it is not a payroll calculation. Capstan does not compute statutory payroll either: it compiles your payroll inputs and hands a documented export to your payroll partner, who does the statutory maths.
You have costed one hire. The next forty need somewhere to live.