What the number leaves out

What sits inside the floor moves with the salary. Employer contribution ceilings, country by country shows where each statutory ceiling stops.

Occupational accident insurance

In Germany it is set per trade association and risk class. In France it is a national average of 2.08% that no individual employer actually pays. In Spain the tariff runs from 0.90% to 7.15% by activity. In Mexico it is recalculated each year from the employer's own accident record. In Portugal it is a private insurance premium. Only France's average is in our totals, and it is marked as an average.

Regional and state payroll taxes

US state unemployment tax is set by fifty state agencies on wage bases from $7,000 to over $67,000. Canadian provincial health levies, such as Ontario's Employer Health Tax at up to 1.95%, sit on top of CPP and EI. Australian state payroll tax runs roughly 4.85% to 5.45% above a state threshold. None of these are in the country totals.

Sector agreements that behave like law

A Dutch sector pension fund, a French or Spanish collective agreement, a German collective agreement paying a thirteenth month — none of these are statutes, and all of them are compulsory for the employers they cover. We exclude them because they are not universal, which means our Netherlands and Germany figures are lower than what most employers there actually pay.

Employer size and the thresholds it trips

The UK Apprenticeship Levy starts at a £3m pay bill. French training and autonomy contributions start at 11 and 20 employees. Australian redundancy pay exempts employers under 15 staff. German U1 and U2 levies apply below about 30. The country pages state the tier we used; a different headcount changes it.

The provider fee

If you have no entity in the country, an employer of record adds a flat monthly fee. The published prices run from $99 to $699 per employee per month, and five of the fourteen providers we checked publish nothing at all.

The cost of being wrong

Misclassifying an employee as a contractor is the expensive failure in this area, and it is priced in back taxes, interest and penalties rather than in any rate table. We do not model it and neither should a spreadsheet.

What we do publish, with a source and a date on every figure, is on the country list. What we exclude and why is set out again on the method page.