One Hire, Measured in Months
Can you afford the person you are about to make an offer to?
The question has an answer and the answer is a date rather than a yes. The arithmetic behind it is the division from lesson one, run forward against a choice nobody has made yet.
A salary is a monthly number. A hire is the month your cash runs out, moved.
So this lesson prices one person properly, moves the date with them, and names where the straight line stops being honest.
The salary is not the cost
Employer social contributions sit on top of gross pay rather than inside it, and across the EU non-wage costs run at 24.8 per cent of total labour cost. Across member states that share ranges from 4.8 per cent up to 32.3.
One chair through one doorway. Everything else rides on the seat, and the account meets the whole load every month from the first payroll run onwards.
That spread is why the figure belongs in a panel rather than a sentence. Near the top and near the bottom of it are two different hires at one salary.
Why nobody can quote you a number
Two European countries publish a single official percentage for what an employer pays on top of a salary. Everywhere else the branch rates are published separately, and any total in circulation is somebody's arithmetic across them.
That is worth knowing before you search for it. The absence is structural rather than a gap in your reading, and it is a good reason to put the question to your finance department rather than to a search engine.
The fully loaded cost is the gross salary plus everything the employer pays on top, and it is the only version a runway calculation can use. The question is narrow enough to answer in a line. What does this salary cost monthly, all in, where the person is employed?
Put your own balance and your own months into the panel, then drag the salary until it reads like the person you are actually considering.
Watch which of the three inputs moves the date hardest. Salary moves it. The balance moves it. Starting later moves it too, and that is the control most hiring conversations never think to touch.
Payroll leaves in more than one movement
The money does not leave in one payment on payday. The pieces have deadlines somebody else set, and employee tax and contributions come off the payslip and go over separately, with no say available to the person they came from.
The net pay, which is the part everybody pictures when they hear a salary.
The withheld tax and contributions, remitted on their own date.
The employer's own contributions, which never appear on a payslip anywhere.
Where the straight line breaks
Some countries cap employer contributions above a ceiling, and above that ceiling the marginal cost of paying more falls away. At senior salaries in those countries the panel's straight line overstates what the next raise costs.
A hire you can afford at twelve months of runway is a different decision at six, and the salary has not changed.
The date is the thing to carry into the conversation. It turns an argument about whether somebody is worth it into a question about whether you can live with the month it produces.
That stack is what the panel draws as a number. The last note is visible from the start, which is the difference between planning a hire and discovering one.
Take the balance and the months off this month's page, run them again with the salary you are actually considering, and write the date down. Ask your finance department for the all-in monthly figure before you make the offer rather than after.
Where these numbers come from
The 24.8 per cent share of total labour cost and the 4.8 to 32.3 spread across member states come from the EU's own statistical office. That the employer withholds and remits, and that the employee cannot opt out, are set in national employment law across the countries checked. Every money figure in the panel is yours, and the markup is an input you can replace.