SaaS Hiring Plan Template and Fully Loaded Employee Cost Calculator

How the calculator works

Step 1 turns a base salary and work state into a fully loaded cost with 2026 US employer rates: Social Security 6.2% up to the $184,500 wage base, Medicare 1.45%, federal unemployment (0.6% on $7,000, more in California), the state's new-employer unemployment rate, the KFF 2025 employer share of health cover, workers' comp, and any 401(k) match, equipment and recruiting you enter. The rates are the same ones the payroll cost calculator uses, with sources listed there. Step 2 lays out 24 months of hires; every role is costed the same way. Step 3 runs your cash month by month (revenue growing at the rate you set) and compares runway with and without one more hire.

Worked example: a 4-person SaaS company hiring 3 more

The calculator opens on this example: $1,500,000 in the bank, $40,000 of monthly revenue growing 2% a month, and $25,000 a month of other costs. Salaries are illustrative, not market data.

The California engineer costs $170,181 a year: $150,000 of salary, $9,300 Social Security, $2,175 Medicare, $147 FUTA (0.6% plus the 1.5% California credit reduction on $7,000), $245 California unemployment (3.5% on $7,000), $7,885 health cover and $429 workers' comp. That is $14,182 a month, 1.13 times salary.

Now test one more engineer on the same terms from Apr 2027. The extra $14,182 a month for 21 months costs $297,817 of cash by Dec 2028, leaving −$27,878 instead of $269,939, and runway falls from 30.6 to 23.5 months: 7.0 months lost. To keep runway unchanged the hire would need to add about $14,182 of new monthly revenue ($170,181 ARR) from Apr 2027, taking revenue from $42,448 to $56,630 a month.

Why so many months for one person? By Dec 2028 the hire has used $297,817, and at that point the plan still burns $45,990 a month, so that cash would have paid for about 6.5 more months on its own. The hire also keeps costing money after month 24.

Fully loaded cost, not base salary

Planning on base salaries is the most common hiring-plan mistake. For the salaries in the example, employer taxes and benefits add 13% to 18% (the share is higher on lower salaries, because health cover is a flat amount), and equipment, software and recruiting come on top. The step 1 breakdown shows each line so you can see where it comes from. Two things the model simplifies: it spreads the capped taxes evenly over the year, while in practice Social Security, FUTA and state unemployment are front-loaded in each calendar year; and it covers US employees only. For people abroad, employer contributions run from about 4% of salary in India to about 51% in Brazil; the payroll cost calculator works those out by country.

Treat every offer as a runway decision

Payroll is usually the largest cost in a SaaS budget; in the example it is 66% of spend in month 1. So the useful question for each hire is not only whether the person adds value, but whether the payoff lands before the cash runs low. The runway-neutral revenue figure in step 3 puts a number on that. For the timing of key hires see the headcount planning guide; to put the plan inside a full year of revenue and costs, use the SaaS budget template.