How much more than salary does an employee cost?

In the US, private-sector benefits averaged USD 14.07 per hour worked against USD 32.82 in wages in June 2026, about 43% on top of wages, according to the BLS. In Canada, the employer's CPP and EI contributions alone add about CAD 5,529 to a CAD 70,000 salary in 2026, before benefits, recruiting or equipment.

What does a video editor cost a marketing agency?

The US median for film and video editors was USD 75,420 a year in May 2025, according to the BLS. In Canada, Job Bank's video editor median is CAD 34.62 an hour, about CAD 72,000 a year at 40 hours a week. Add payroll costs, benefits and ramp-up time.

How long does it take to hire someone?

SHRM's 2026 benchmark puts the median time to fill a non-executive role at 39 days across industries. Then add the notice period and the weeks before the new hire works without close review. For an agency, the capacity usually arrives months after the decision to hire.

Should an agency hire or automate production work?

Hire when the gap needs ongoing ownership, client judgement or specialist skill. Automate when the gap is repeatable production with clear inputs and a clear standard, like resizing, first drafts or report assembly. In both cases, compare the cost of approved work, including review and corrections.

What it really costs to hire at a marketing agency (2026)

Hiring at a marketing agency costs far more than the salary. Add employer payroll contributions, benefits, recruiting, equipment and software, then the weeks of senior review before a new hire works independently. Divide the total by the hours actually left for client work, and you get the number that matters: the cost per usable delivery hour.

Most agency owners budget a hire as a salary. Then the first year arrives with a recruiter invoice, a laptop, three more software seats and a creative lead spending every Friday reviewing the new designer’s work. The salary was the smallest surprise.

Here’s how to cost a hire properly, with 2026 benchmarks for the US and Canada.

How do you calculate the full cost of an agency employee?

Build it from real cost lines, and keep cash spending separate from the time your existing team puts in.

First-year cash cost = salary + employer payroll contributions + benefits + recruiting + equipment and software + any temporary cover

Next to that, keep a budget of management hours: interviews, onboarding, briefing and review. Those hours are already paid for in someone else’s salary, so they don’t add cash. But they come straight out of your senior people’s capacity, which is usually the scarcest thing you have.

Cost line	What to include	The common mistake
Pay	Salary and expected bonus	Using a national median as your offer
Employer contributions	Payroll taxes and contributions	Counting the employee’s deductions as your cost
Benefits	Health, dental, pension and other employer-paid benefits	Adding a benefits percentage on top of itemised costs
Recruiting	Job ads, assessments, recruiter fees	Assuming every hire needs a recruiter
Tools	New licences, laptop, support	Charging a shared subscription to one person
Transition	Temporary cover, paid training	Counting the salary twice as “onboarding”
Management time	Interviews, coaching, review hours	Booking allocated time as new cash

Keep one-off and recurring costs in separate columns, so a laptop doesn’t turn into an annual charge.

What do marketing agency roles pay in the US and Canada?

Government wage data gives you a starting point, but it describes broad job groups across all employers, locations and levels.

The US figures are May 2025 annual medians in USD from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Canadian figures are national hourly medians in CAD from Job Bank (the marketing and design pages were updated November 19, 2025, for the 2023 to 2024 period).

Agency role	US median (annual)	Canada median (hourly)	Canada at 2,080 hours
Marketing specialist or coordinator	USD 78,760	CAD 35.58	CAD 74,006
Graphic designer	USD 62,960	CAD 31.25	CAD 65,000
Video editor	USD 75,420	CAD 34.62	CAD 72,010
Media buyer	No separate BLS figure	CAD 36.06	CAD 75,005

A few notes so you read these fairly:

The annual Canadian figures are our arithmetic, at 40 hours a week for 52 weeks. They are not published salaries.
The US marketing figure covers market research analysts and marketing specialists. The Canadian one covers advertising, marketing and public relations professionals.
Job Bank title pages (video editor, media buyer) report the median for the broader occupational group each title belongs to. The media buyer figure sits under purchasing occupations, so it doesn’t isolate agency paid-media specialists.
US media buyers have no separate BLS figure. The marketing specialist line is the nearest proxy.

Before you make an offer, check your local market and write down the scope. A designer who executes supplied concepts and one who owns art direction and presents to clients are different hires.

How much do benefits add to salary?

In the US, benefits cost private-industry employers about 43% on top of wages, on average. In June 2026, private-industry employers paid USD 32.82 an hour in wages and USD 14.07 in benefits, according to the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation. Benefits were 30.0% of total compensation, which works out to about 42.9% of wages.

Watch that denominator. “30% of compensation” and “43% on top of salary” describe the same number. Mixing them up is one of the most common budgeting errors.

Two cautions. The BLS figure covers private industry broadly (it excludes the self-employed and private households), so use it as a sanity check and get your real benefit quotes. And its “benefits” already include paid leave and legally required costs such as payroll taxes, so don’t add the 43% on top of payroll contributions you’ve counted separately. If the salary already pays for vacation, reduce the available hours instead of adding it again.

What does a CAD 70,000 employee cost in Canada?

A CAD 70,000 salary costs the employer CAD 75,529.05 once CPP and EI contributions are added in 2026, before any benefits or other costs.

This example assumes a full year of work outside Quebec, standard CPP and EI, and the 2026 rates from the Canada Revenue Agency.

Item	Calculation	Employer cost (CAD)
Salary		70,000.00
CPP	(70,000 − 3,500 basic exemption) × 5.95%	3,956.75
CPP2	Salary is below the 74,600 threshold	0.00
EI	68,900 maximum insurable earnings × 2.282%	1,572.30
Total		75,529.05

CPP2 applies at 4% on earnings between CAD 74,600 and CAD 85,000, so it starts to matter for senior hires. Quebec has its own pension and parental insurance plans, so this calculation doesn’t carry over there.

The total still excludes benefits, workers’ compensation, any provincial employer health tax, recruiting and tools. Your payroll provider can give you the exact figures for your province.

How do recruiting and onboarding change the first year?

Recruiting delays when the capacity arrives, and onboarding takes time from the people you were trying to relieve.

SHRM’s 2026 recruiting benchmark puts the median time to fill a non-executive role at 39 days. That’s across all industries, and it ends at the accepted offer, not at the first piece of work a client approves without changes.

Then comes onboarding. Write down what the new person has to learn: each client’s context, your folder structure and naming, your reporting definitions and your approval rules. Give each handover an owner.

Say your creative lead spends three hours a week reviewing a new hire’s work for six weeks. That’s 18 hours of your most valuable person’s time. Price it at your internal rate and decide in advance which of their work moves elsewhere.

What does one usable delivery hour cost?

Divide the role’s full annual cost by the hours left for client work after leave, meetings, training and admin. Your own timesheets should set those allowances.

Say a role costs CAD 90,000 a year all in, and leaves 1,200 hours for client delivery. Each usable hour costs CAD 75. If meetings and internal work shrink that to 1,000 hours, the same person costs CAD 90 an hour.

That’s not your selling price. Pricing also has to cover overheads and your margin. But it’s the right number to compare against every other way of getting the work done.

Check it against approved work, too. An editor can produce plenty of drafts while your creative lead drowns in corrections. The AI ad creative QA checklist helps you define “approved” before you compare options.

What happens to the cost if someone leaves early?

Model an early departure as its own scenario rather than applying a generic “replacement cost” percentage. List what you’d pay again: recruiting, temporary cover and another round of onboarding. Add the management hours needed to reassign the client work.

Then reduce the risk. Keep briefs, decisions and working files where the whole team can reach them, give every client a backup owner, and check in early on workload, before a mismatch turns into a resignation.

Should you hire, use contractors or automate production?

Match the option to the gap, then compare the full cost of approved work.

Hire when the gap needs ongoing ownership, client judgement or specialist skill.
Use contractors for uneven demand or a defined project.
Automate repeatable production with clear inputs and a clear standard: research, first drafts, resizing and report assembly.

Whatever you choose, include briefing, review, corrections and coordination in the cost. Cheap production isn’t cheap if a senior person has to rebuild it.

Growthshiner’s AI employees take the production hours, set up with each client’s brand kit and your house rules, while your people make the calls at four gates: the brief, the concept, the final creative and anything that publishes or spends money. Count those review hours in your comparison.

Before you open a role:

List the actual work waiting, from recent client jobs.
Separate repeatable production from decisions that need an owner.
Estimate approved output and review time for each option.
Compare recurring costs, setup costs and the effect on workload.
Revisit the decision after a month, against real hours and approved work.

For the capacity side of this decision, read how to scale a marketing agency without hiring.