What a First Hire Costs a Month: Four Options, Side by Side

How to read the table:

• The two jobs. Each employee figure is the middle (median) wage for one job, plus employer taxes, before benefits. Half the people in a job earn less than the median and half earn more. So the administrative assistant figure isn't the least a hire can cost, and the web developer figure isn't the most.
• The job names. BLS calls the first job Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive. It calls the second one Web Developers.
• Texas next to the US. The Texas figures count $243 a year of Texas unemployment tax, at the 2.70% entry rate. That's $20.25 a month. The US figures count no state unemployment tax, because each state sets its own. So the Texas and US figures aren't like for like by that amount.
• An employee next to a contractor. The employee figures are a middle wage plus employer taxes. The contractor and overseas figures are what one owner paid, with no employer payroll taxes on top. They aren't like for like, so this page doesn't rank one over the other on cost.

A full-time first hire, as an employee in Texas at the middle (median) wage, costs $4,073.18 a month for an administrative assistant and $7,720.73 a month for a web developer, in wages plus employer taxes, before benefits. At US median wages, with no state unemployment tax counted, the same two jobs cost $4,268.23 and $8,314.98 a month. All four use BLS May 2025 wages and 2026 tax rates.

The math for one full-time job

Here's the Texas web developer, line by line:

1. Median wage: $85,800.00 a year.
2. Employer Social Security, 6.2%: $5,319.60.
3. Employer Medicare, 1.45%: $1,244.10.
4. Federal unemployment tax: $42.00.
5. Texas unemployment tax: $243.00.
6. Total: $92,648.70 a year. Divided by 12, that's $7,720.73 a month.

A remote employee who lives in another state may fall under that state's rules. Check with that state's workforce agency.

There's no sourced market figure for what a full-time overseas hire costs a month. This site looked for two solid published sources and didn't find them. So it shows what one owner has paid, and no market rate.

In Jeremy Kenerson's own hiring, he has paid a full-time overseas contractor about $1,500 a month. That figure leaves out payment fees, any agency fee, and anything the person's own country requires.

On the tax side, the IRS says the place where the work is done generally decides where the pay is from. Pay for work done outside the US, paid to a nonresident alien, is normally not subject to US tax withholding. This isn't tax advice. Ask your accountant.

The employee figures on this page leave out six things: benefits, paid time off, hiring costs, equipment, software, and workers' comp if you choose to carry it.

Start with benefits. For scale, private employers in the US spent an average of $46.89 on pay and benefits for each hour worked in June 2026. Wages were $32.82 of that, and benefits were $14.07. BLS counts five things as benefits:

Don't add that $14.07 on top of the totals on this page. The last row includes payroll taxes, and the totals here already count Social Security, Medicare and unemployment tax. Adding the two would count those taxes twice. BLS rounds each figure, so the rows and the total can be a cent apart.

That average covers all private employers in the US, of every size and every job. It isn't a figure for Texas, for a first hire, or for any of the four jobs above. This page doesn't cover which benefits an employer must or should offer.

Texas adds one cost with a dollar figure: unemployment tax of $243 a worker a year for a new employer in 2026. That's 2.70% on the first $9,000 of each worker's pay. Four more Texas rules are in the table below. Each has its source.

Workers' comp is the owner's choice in Texas. The steps guide says what the state says coverage does, and what an employer with no coverage has to file.

The option that fits your first hire depends on the work the hire would do.

• If the hire would do production work, such as web design and development, video editing, email and funnel builds, CRM and automation, or graphic design, insourcing with DeskTeam360 is one of your choices.
• If the hire would answer the office phone or run the office, a team isn't the fit.
• If you need one person on the job full time, a plan isn't that. The Entrepreneur plan works on 1 task at a time.

This page doesn't tell you which to choose.

• Wages. The median wages are BLS figures from its Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. They're the May 2025 numbers for Texas and the US.
• Tax rates. Employer Social Security and Medicare come from IRS Topic 751, and federal unemployment tax from IRS Topic 759. The Texas rate comes from the Texas Workforce Commission, for 2026.
• What's counted. Wages and the employer's taxes: Social Security, Medicare, the federal unemployment tax and, in the Texas columns, the Texas one.
• What's left out. The six things listed under "What do these monthly figures leave out?" above.
• The math. Each yearly total is the wage, plus 6.2%, plus 1.45%, plus $42, plus $243 in the Texas columns. Each cent amount is rounded half up. A month is the year divided by 12. Every total was worked out two different ways, and all 16 matched.
• Federal unemployment tax. The $42 assumes the full state credit. The US Labor Department lists the states that could get a smaller credit for 2026, and Texas isn't on that list. The final list is set after November 10, 2026.
• The contractor figures. They come from Jeremy Kenerson's own statement on October 2, 2026, about his own hiring of contractors. He gave no year for those hires.
• What couldn't be sourced. A market rate for an overseas hire. So this page shows none.

Cite this page: Texas First Hire, "What a First Hire Costs a Month: Four Options, Side by Side," https://texasfirsthire.com/first-hire-cost, last updated October 2, 2026.