Financial Services Worked 3.9 Per Cent More Hours Last Year. Each Hour Produced The Same.

When you hire a paraplanner offshore from Australia you are buying hours, not advice. The licensed judgement stays with the person who signs the file. Everything upstream of that signature is hours, and hours are exactly what your sector spent more of last year without getting more back.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics released the Australian System of National Accounts for 2025-26 this morning. Hours worked across financial and insurance services rose 3.9 per cent. Gross value added per hour worked rose 0.2 per cent. The whole economy managed 0.5 per cent on hours that grew 1.8 per cent, so the sector put in more than twice the extra hours and got less out of each one.

That is not a productivity lecture. It is a payroll line. Outstaffer publishes what employing someone through it costs, from $250 per employee per month, and I would rather you check it against the one below than take either on faith.

What 3.9 per cent more hours costs an advice practice

ABS average weekly ordinary time earnings for a full-time adult in financial and insurance services were $2,341.30 in May 2026. Call it $121,748 a year per head, before super, software or a desk.

Apply the sector’s own numbers to one of those heads. Hours up 3.9 per cent is about $4,748 of additional ordinary-time wages. Output per hour up 0.2 per cent is worth about $244 against the same base. The gap is roughly $4,500 a year, per full-time person, of time you paid for and did not get back.

Multiply by six advisers and support staff and that is $27,000 a year, on the sector’s own numbers.

What does a paraplanner do that an adviser should not?

Research, modelling, product comparison, file notes, document assembly and the second draft nobody wants to write. None of it carries a licence. All of it is hours-dense, and in a practice where the adviser is also the owner, most of it happens after six o’clock.

What moves offshore in an advice practice, and what never will

The strategy, the client relationship and the signature stay in Australia. They are the licensed product and they are not available at any price. The preparation underneath them is a different question entirely.

This is the same line a licensed signature draws through an accounting practice, where the tax agent registration cannot move and the workpapers can. Advice practices have the cleaner version of it, because the obligation sits on a named individual rather than a firm.

Who carries the file when that person takes leave?

Usually nobody, and that is the real exposure. ASIC’s work on credit licensees found firms running a whole function with one trained person in it, and only some of those had cover. An advice practice with one paraplanner has the same single point of failure, and it shows up as a backlog rather than a breach.

Related reading

• Which roles should move first, and why the backlog decides it
• What a properly employed remote hire costs once compliance and equipment are counted

The honest counter, which is a good one

A fair reading of the same data says the extra hours were not waste. Financial services absorbed a decade of regulatory documentation, and a lot of 2025-26 went into work that genuinely has to be done by somebody. Gross value added per hour is also a blunt instrument at the level of one practice: it cannot see a file that was prepared well.

Both of those are true. Neither changes the arithmetic, because the question was never whether the hours were necessary. It was who should be doing them.

Before you hire a paraplanner in Australia or anywhere else

Count the hours in your practice that nobody signs. If that number is more than one person’s week, you have a resourcing decision rather than a hiring decision, and the two have different answers. Licensing and supervision obligations turn on your own authorisations, so take advice on yours before you move any part of a file.

The sector has now published what a year of extra hours bought it. If you would rather see what the preparation layer costs when somebody else employs it, sign up and price one paraplanner role. Or carry the $4,500 a head for another year, which is also a decision.

What is the honest hours count in your practice that carries no signature?