The difference is who employs the person and when the money leaves. A staffing agency runs a search, charges a slice of first-year salary once, and hands you a candidate you then have to employ yourself. An employer of record employs them for you and charges a flat monthly fee for as long as they stay. Two products. Most founders price them as one.
Which matters more this month than it did last month.
The agency sells you a search. The EOR sells you an employer
CreditorWatch's Business Risk Index, published this morning, put total first-time insolvencies at 1,834 in August, with chief economist Ivan Colhoun pointing at fuel costs, this year's minimum wage rise and the prospect of a further rate rise in September. In that weather, when a cost lands stops being a detail.
An agency's obligation ends at placement. Yours begins there: the contract, the payroll, the statutory on-costs, the classification question nobody enjoys. An employer of record takes those on and prices them monthly. If you have already worked through the case for running the search yourself, this is the second half of that decision, and it is the half that keeps costing money after the hire starts.
Outstaffer publishes both sides of it on one pricing page, which is either useful or a confession, depending on your mood.
What's the difference between hiring through an EOR and hiring through a staffing agency?
An agency is paid once, as a percentage of salary, for finding the person. An employer of record is paid monthly, as a flat fee, for legally employing them. The agency fee scales with how well you pay. The monthly fee does not.
What a staffing agency's percentage actually costs on an Australian salary
Take the official number. ABS average weekly ordinary time earnings for full-time adults were $2,083.70 in May 2026, up 3.7 per cent over the year. Annualised, that role costs about $108,350.
Sagan Passport publishes a 35 per cent success fee on its one-time placement tier, on top of a $500 deposit. On $108,350 that is roughly $37,900, payable in month one, before the hire has produced a single week of work.
Outstaffer publishes an employer of record fee from USD $250 per employee per month. Across twelve months that is USD $3,000, and it arrives in twelve pieces, next to the output that is paying for it.
Same hire. One bill lands before the value does. The other lands beside it.
Who manages the offshore staff day to day?
You do, in both models. Neither an agency nor an employer of record supervises the work, because employing someone and managing someone are different jobs. Anyone selling a monthly fee that quietly includes running your team is selling a third thing, and what that monthly line adds up to is worth reading closely before you sign it.
The strongest case for paying once
It stops. Hunt St publishes $5,000 plus GST as a flat placement fee with no ongoing costs, and across a five-year tenure that beats any monthly model comfortably. If you already hold an entity in the country, a payroll function and someone who can read a local employment contract, paying once is the right answer and a monthly fee is a subscription to a problem you solved years ago.
Most Australian businesses between ten and fifty staff hold none of those three.
Related reading
Pick on cashflow first, then on who carries the risk
Compare the two on when the money leaves and on who is the employer once the search ends. Where working capital is the binding constraint this quarter, a fee spread across twelve months beats a fee concentrated into one, even where the five-year total reads worse. Classification and payroll obligations turn on your own facts, so get advice on your arrangement rather than on a blog post.
If you want the monthly side priced before you argue with it, open an account and read the fee schedule. Then put a staffing agency quote beside it and tell me which one your bank balance prefers.
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