What An Australian Tech Team Costs Per Head Is Not The Number In Your Budget

An Australian tech team costs about 18 per cent more per head than the salary on the offer letter. A $141,133 salary carries $16,936 of superannuation and $8,615 of New South Wales payroll tax. That is $166,684 a head, before the laptop, the desk or a single software seat.

Founders plan against the salary. The other two arrive anyway.

We sell employment, so weigh what follows with that in mind. Outstaffer runs an employer of record service, and this on-cost stack is precisely what changes shape when a role sits in another market.

The salary is the published part, and it is the smallest problem

The Australian Bureau of Statistics put average weekly ordinary time earnings for full-time adults in information media and telecommunications at $2,714.10 in its May 2026 earnings release, issued on 13 August 2026. Annualised, that is $141,133 a head. Professional, scientific and technical services sits at $2,389.60 a week.

Those are industry averages, not a market rate for a senior engineer. Use your own offer letters instead. The arithmetic underneath works on any base you put into it.

Two statutory on-costs sit on top, and one of them taxes the other

Superannuation is the straightforward one. The ATO puts the super guarantee rate at 12 per cent. On $141,133 that is $16,936 a year. Super is only required on qualifying earnings up to a maximum contribution base, which the ATO sets at $270,830 for 2026-27, so a salary at this level attracts the full 12 per cent.

Payroll tax is the one that gets missed, because it is a state tax and it never appears on a payslip. In New South Wales the rate is 5.45 per cent on wages above a $1.2 million annual threshold.

Why does payroll tax apply to the superannuation as well?

Because Revenue NSW treats employer super contributions as taxable wages in their own right, alongside salary. The payroll tax base for one head is therefore $141,133 plus $16,936, which is $158,069. At 5.45 per cent, that is $8,615.

Add the three together and one head costs $166,684. The salary is 84.7 per cent of it.

What does an Australian tech team cost per head?

$166,684 on those figures, in New South Wales, above the threshold. Four engineers carry $102,204 of on-costs between them, which is about three-quarters of another engineer’s salary, spent on nobody.

Treat that as a floor. Workers compensation, the software seats and the desk sit on top of it, and none of the three is inside the number.

The threshold is the honest objection, and it is a good one

Below $1.2 million of annual wages in New South Wales, payroll tax is zero. A six-person business pays none of it, and its on-cost is superannuation alone, which is 12 per cent rather than 18.

That is true, and it is also the trap. The threshold is a line you cross on an ordinary Tuesday, usually on the hire that tips you over, and from then on every wage dollar above it is taxed. Rates and thresholds differ in every state and territory, so check your own, and get advice on your position rather than taking this arithmetic as it stands.

The same gap shows up in cheaper roles. An hour of administrative work costs more than the hourly rate suggests for exactly these reasons, at a smaller scale.

Related reading

• The real all-in monthly cost of an employee abroad
• How much does offshore staffing cost in Australia

Price the head, not the salary

The argument for building a technical team abroad used to be scarcity. It is now a cost and hours decision, and the on-costs are half of why. A head priced at salary is priced at 84.7 per cent of itself, and every headcount plan built that way is short by about 18 per cent.

So price the head. Take your own average tech salary and add 12 per cent. If your wage bill is already past the threshold, the next head adds 5.45 per cent of that subtotal on top. Below the threshold it adds none, the one case where salary really is most of the cost.

Then put one role through a loaded number and see what it does to the plan. Which of your tech seats did you budget at salary, and what would the fully loaded figure per head have changed?