You're right, Bill! We have really 2 different rates where I work. One 
was for office personnel, which added a nominal 50% overhead rate to 
their salaries, and wage personnel, which added almost 75% overhead to 
their rates!! We had a specialized manufacturing environment - thus the 
different rates per employee.

Our overhead rates included everything from FICA, health and life 
insurance, facilities, and corporate expenses.

Dennis

William Chops Westfield wrote:

>
> On Nov 23, 2004, at 8:57 AM, Olin Lathrop wrote:
>
>> A good rule of thumb is that the total compensation cost and directly
>> related expenses for an employee is 15% above what is actually
>> paid to the employee.
>
>
> Really? FICA by itself is 6+ percent, and there's the employer side
> contributions to medicare, disability, medical, dental, and life
> insurance. That'd get up to about 15% of low-end employees pretty quick,
> wouldn't it? Then there's vacation/sick leave (5 weeks out of 52 is 
> almost
> 10 percent by itself), retirement benefits (if any), and overhead 
> costs (HR,
> payroll, etc)
>
> I thought we used 50% as a guideline. Or maybe it was $50k/employee? It's
> been a while since I was a manager, and even then I didn't have to pay 
> attention
> too much to this sort of thing. And of course we like to aim for 
> something
> like $600k of income (for the company) for each employee...
>
>
>> This does not count use of electricity, floor space, equipment required,
>> etc, but that doesn't need to be anywhere near that high.
>>
> When was the last time you priced silicon valley floor space? And 
> maintenance
> (including the gardeners, of course, since landscaping is required...)
>
> Yeah, you can operate at lower overhead, but I don't think it's 
> "normal" for
> a company of any size to "only" spend 15% over a salary. This of 
> course is
> one reason why "consultants" are so popular...
>
> BillW
>
>
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