Hiring
The rate on the job ad is roughly three quarters of what the person costs you. Here is the rest of it, line by line, at the rates that applied from 1 July 2026.
Every business owner who has ever thought about putting someone on the front desk has done the same sum. Twenty hours a week, thirty dollars an hour, call it six hundred a week. It is a comforting number and it is wrong by about a third.
None of what follows is an argument against hiring. It is the arithmetic you should have before you decide, because the most expensive version of this decision is the one made on the wage alone and revisited nine months later.
01
Most office and administration roles in the private sector fall under the Clerks Award for private sector employees (MA000002). It sets a legal floor by classification level, and paying under it is not a negotiation you and the employee can have. The levels run from Level 1, the entry level filing and reception work, up through Level 5.
The Fair Work Commission's 2026 Annual Wage Review lifted modern award minimum rates by 4.75 per cent from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026, and lifted the National Minimum Wage to $26.44 an hour, or $1,004.90 a week. Under the Clerks Award, a full-time adult in their first year at Level 1 sits at $26.97 an hour and Level 2 at $29.45 an hour.
02
The superannuation guarantee reached 12 per cent on 1 July 2025 and has stayed there. It is calculated on ordinary time earnings, it is payable on top of the wage rather than out of it, and since 2022 there is no monthly earnings threshold below which you can skip it. Somebody on eight hours a week gets super the same as anybody else.
One thing that catches people out: annual leave loading normally counts as ordinary time earnings too, so super is usually payable on the loading as well, not just on the wage. It only falls out of the calculation where the loading is demonstrably compensation for lost overtime, which almost never applies to an office role.
03
Under the National Employment Standards a permanent employee gets four weeks of paid annual leave a year, ten days of paid personal and carer's leave, and a paid day off for every public holiday that falls on a day they would normally work. In 2026 that is eleven public holidays in Western Australia and Tasmania and as many as fifteen in the ACT, so the number depends on where you trade.
On top of the four weeks, most awards including the Clerks Award add annual leave loading of 17.5 per cent, an extra payment on top of normal pay for the weeks the person is away. It exists for historical holiday-pay reasons and it is still there.
Add it up and a permanent employee is paid for fifty-two weeks and available for something closer to forty-five. That gap is not waste and it is not something to resent. It is simply the thing the hourly rate hides.
04
Workers compensation is compulsory in every state once you employ anyone, and the premium is a percentage of wages set by the classification your business sits in. For New South Wales, icare's published rate schedule for 2026-27 puts Business Administrative Services (WIC 785400) at 0.682 per cent of wages, with Secretarial Services at 1.020 per cent. The scheme-wide target collection rate is 1.99 per cent, frozen for 2026-27 and 2027-28, and there is a minimum premium of $240.
The other states publish their own. Victoria's Office Administrative Services industry rate is 1.308 per cent against a scheme average of 1.8 per cent, and Queensland's Office Administrative Services rate is 52.7 cents per $100 of wages. Three schemes, three answers, same job.
Payroll tax is the one people worry about and mostly do not pay. It is a state tax that only applies above a threshold on total wages: $1.2 million a year in New South Wales at 5.45 per cent, $1 million in Victoria at 4.85 per cent with a lower regional rate, and $1.3 million in Queensland at 4.75 per cent. If your whole wage bill is under the threshold in your state, this line is zero. If you run a group of related companies, the threshold applies to the group and not to each entity, which is where growing businesses get surprised.
Long service leave is the slow one. In most states an employee accrues an entitlement after a long stretch with you, commonly around two months of paid leave at ten years, and it accrues from the first day even though it is not payable for years. It does not show up in year one, and it is real.
05
SEEK does not publish a public price list for job ads. The price depends on the ad type, the role and the location, and you see it at checkout, so budget for it rather than quoting a figure from a blog. That is the cheap part anyway. The expensive part is your own time: writing the ad, filtering a few hundred applications, phone screening, two rounds of interviews, reference checks, then onboarding.
If a recruiter does it for you, the market convention is a percentage of first-year salary. We are not going to print an average, because the figure that circulates on Australian HR blogs traces back to a survey we could not find any evidence exists. Ask for the fee in writing, ask what the replacement guarantee is, and compare two.
The closest thing to an Australian benchmark for total cost-per-hire is the ELMO and AHRI HR Industry Benchmark work, which put it at $23,860 per hire. Two caveats and they are large: that is 2021 data published in 2022, so it is five years old, and it averages across all roles including mid-level managers, which is what drove it up. It is not the number for a part-time receptionist. It is useful only as evidence that the true figure is much larger than a job ad.
Then there is the ramp. Nobody is useful in week one. For an admin role, four to eight weeks before they run unsupervised is normal, and every one of those weeks is paid at full rate while somebody senior answers their questions.
06
One part-time admin at a small professional services firm in Sydney. Twenty hours a week, permanent part-time, classified at Clerks Award Level 2 in their first year at $29.45 an hour. Every rate below is statutory, award standard, or from a scheme's published schedule. Everything else is an assumption, and it is stated.
| Line | Year one | Where the rate comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary wages, 20 hours × 52 weeks | $30,628 | Clerks Award Level 2, $29.45/hr |
| Superannuation at 12% | $3,675 | ATO super guarantee |
| Annual leave loading at 17.5% | $412 | Award standard, on 4 weeks |
| Super on the leave loading | $49 | Loading is ordinary time earnings |
| Workers compensation | $240 | 0.682% is $209, under icare's $240 minimum |
| Recruitment, $1,500 spread over 2 years | $750 | The ad, your time, the ramp |
| Payroll tax | $0 | Under the state threshold |
| Total, year one | $35,755 | Before a desk, a laptop or a phone |
Assumptions: permanent part-time, office classification, no overtime, no penalty rates, no weekend work, and a business under the payroll tax threshold. Change any one of those and the answer changes.
Now divide by the hours actually worked rather than the hours paid. Take out four weeks of annual leave, allow a week of the ten days of personal leave being used, and allow two weeks' worth of public holidays. That leaves about forty-five weeks, or nine hundred hours.
$29.45
The award rate that goes on the job ad
$39.73
What one hour of work actually costs
1.35×
The multiplier on this example
$35,755
Year one, before equipment or software
Arithmetic on the example above, not a claim about anybody's business. Run it on your own figures with the hiring calculator, which uses the same statutory rates and lets you change everything else.
And that total still excludes the desk, the laptop, the phone, the software seats, the training, and the manager hours spent supervising. It also uses the cheapest workers compensation classification there is. Put the same person in a trade business and the premium line moves by more than the rest of the table combined.
07
Not usually, and not for the reason people think. A casual gets a 25 per cent loading instead of paid leave, so on the same base you are paying $36.81 an hour rather than $29.45. You only pay for hours worked, which is genuinely useful if your volume is spiky, and you carry no leave liability on the balance sheet.
08
This is a studio that builds systems, so you would expect the conclusion to be that you should automate instead. That is not the conclusion.
Hire a person when the work needs judgement, when a customer is upset, when somebody has to walk down the corridor and physically sort something out, when a licence or a clinical qualification is required, or when the relationship itself is the product. None of that is a workflow and pretending it is will cost you customers.
Automate the part that is genuinely repetitive: the same reply to the same question forty times a week, the appointment reminder, the follow-up nobody remembers to send, the enquiry that arrives at 8pm and sits unread until Tuesday. That work does not need judgement, it needs to happen. If most of the forty hours you are about to buy is that, you have a systems problem wearing a staffing problem's clothes.
The honest test is the one at the top of this page. Work out your real number, then count how many of those hours go on things a system would do the same way every time. If the answer is most of them, we build that from $1,750 plus GST as a one-off. If the answer is that you need somebody to make decisions and hold relationships, hire the person and pay them properly.
Questions
Where these numbers come from
Every figure above is either the reader's own arithmetic or one of these. Where a range could not be verified against a primary source, the post says so in the sentence rather than pretending to a decimal place.
Fair Work Ombudsman
Fair Work Ombudsman
Australian Taxation Office
Fair Work Ombudsman
Fair Work Ombudsman
icare NSW
Revenue NSW
State Revenue Office Victoria
Queensland Revenue Office
Australian HR Institute
SmartCompany, reporting SEEK and Nature research, February 2026
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