Financial Services & Accounting Firms: How to Calculate Your Payroll Costs (2026)

Managed payroll by headcount for a financial services firm

10 employees: $450 a month, $5,400 a year; 25 employees: $1,125 a month, $13,500 a year; 50 employees: $2,250 a month, $27,000 a year; 100 employees: $4,500 a month, $54,000 a year. Every row is $45 per employee per month, all-inclusive, inside the payroll software you already use, with no monthly minimum, so the per-employee cost is the same at 10 as at 100. Nothing in the financial services firm setup, deferred compensation structures, FINRA recordkeeping, performance fee payroll and Series license holder compliance, is billed as an add-on.

The employer-side tax that rides on every financial services firm wage

At the May 2025 national median for personal financial advisors, $105,070 a year or about $51 an hour, the employer share of Social Security and Medicare is $8,038 per employee per year and FUTA is $42 after the state credit, before state unemployment at the assigned rate. Those costs are the same whoever runs payroll; the calculator question is only who does the work and who carries the error.

Form 5500 series returns for employee benefit plans are due the last day of the seventh month after the plan year ends, which is July 31 for a calendar year plan, and must be filed electronically through EFAST2. The penalty for failure to file is $250 per day, not to exceed $150,000.

The in-house line in the calculation

BLS OEWS May 2025: payroll and timekeeping clerks, national median $58,260, mean $59,630. Add roughly 30 percent for benefits and employer taxes, about $75,738, before the software that person runs, and set it against the headcount rows above. Managed payroll stays under that loaded figure until about 140 employees.