A quoted salary is only part of what hiring someone in the US actually costs. At $100,000 base, the true annual cost runs to roughly 1.08× base salary once employer FICA, FUTA, and SUTA are added, before health insurance or 401(k) matching. SUTA varies by state, adjust it below if you know your real figures.
Social Security
6.2%
capped at $184,500/yr
Medicare
1.45%
matches employee, uncapped
FUTA
0.6%
on first $7,000
SUTA (typical)
~2.7%
varies by state, configurable
Typical new-employer rate ~2.7%. Check your state unemployment agency for your real rate.
Ranges from $7,000 to over $72,800 depending on state.
Total annual cost of employment
$107,949
Load on top of salary
1.08× base
Base salary
$100,000
Social Security, employer share (6.2%)
Matches the employee rate 1:1
$6,200
Medicare, employer share (1.45%)
Matches the employee rate 1:1, uncapped (Additional Medicare Tax is employee-only)
$1,450
FUTA (0.6% net rate)
On the first $7,000 of wages
$42
SUTA (2.7%)
On the first $9,500 of wages, your state may differ
$257
Does not include employer-sponsored health insurance premiums or retirement plan matching (401(k)), both common but entirely discretionary/plan-specific costs, not statutory payroll taxes.
Two of the US employer's costs are simple matches of what the employee already pays: Social Security and Medicare. If you know an employee's FICA withholding, you already know most of the employer's matching FICA cost too, with one exception, the Additional Medicare Tax on high earners is employee-only, never matched.
FUTA and SUTA work differently, and this is where the US genuinely diverges from every other market on this site. FUTA is a single federal rate, small and predictable at 0.6% on a tiny $7,000 wage base. SUTA is the real variable, both the rate AND the wage base differ by state, sometimes dramatically, a state with a low new-employer rate but a high wage base can end up costing more than a state with the opposite combination.
This calculator deliberately doesn't pretend to know your specific state's SUTA figures, that would require maintaining 50 separate, frequently-revised tables. Instead it gives you a reasonable default and lets you override both the rate and the wage base directly, so the total is only as accurate as the numbers you put in for that one line.
Keep your numbers current
Tax rates and allowances change every year
Get an email when we update this calculator for new rates, so you're never planning from stale numbers.
Beyond the gross salary, US employers pay their matching FICA share (Social Security + Medicare), FUTA, and SUTA. For a $100,000 hire using the representative SUTA default, that's a total load of roughly 1.08× base salary, about $7,949 above the quoted salary, before any recruitment fee, equipment budget, health insurance premiums, or 401(k) match, none of which are statutory payroll taxes so none are included here.
For Social Security (6.2%, capped at the $184,500 wage base) and Medicare (1.45%, uncapped), yes, it's a straight 1:1 match. The Additional Medicare Tax (an extra 0.9% on wages above $200,000) is the one exception, it's withheld from the employee only, with no employer match at all.
FUTA (Federal Unemployment Tax Act) is a single federal rate, 6.0% on the first $7,000 of wages, but employers who pay their state unemployment tax (SUTA) in full and on time get a credit of up to 5.4%, reducing the effective FUTA rate to just 0.6%. SUTA is the state-level counterpart, and unlike FUTA, both the rate and the wage base vary enormously by state, new-employer rates commonly run 1-4%, and wage bases range from $7,000 in several states to over $72,800 in Washington.
Because getting it right would mean maintaining 50 separate, frequently-changing rate and wage-base tables, a research effort roughly the size of building 50 separate mini-calculators. Instead, SUTA here is fully configurable, both the rate and the wage base, defaulted to common mid-range figures (a 2.7% new-employer rate and a $9,500 wage base). If you know your actual state's numbers, enter them directly for an accurate total; otherwise treat the default as a reasonable national approximation, not your specific state's real cost.
Employer-sponsored health insurance premiums and 401(k) matching contributions, both extremely common in US tech hiring but genuinely discretionary and plan-specific rather than statutory payroll taxes, so there's no single national rate to model. A typical employer health plan can easily add several thousand dollars per employee per year on top of everything this calculator does cover, budget for it separately based on your specific benefits plan.
The US baseline (FICA + FUTA + a representative SUTA estimate) typically comes in lower as a percentage of salary than Germany's roughly 21% combined statutory rate or the UK's uncapped 15% Employer National Insurance, mainly because Social Security stops accruing well before high earners' full salary and FUTA/SUTA are both low relative to European social-insurance schemes. The gap narrows once US employer health insurance costs, which have no European equivalent modelled the same way, are factored in.
What to check next
Check the market before you set the budget or compare a contract option.