Technology & SaaS Companies: How to Calculate Your Payroll Costs (2026)

Managed payroll by headcount for a technology company

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 technology company setup, equity compensation handling, remote employee multi-state tax, contractor classification and commission payroll, is billed as an add-on.

The employer-side tax that rides on every technology company wage

At the May 2025 national median for software developers, $135,980 a year or about $65 an hour, the employer share of Social Security and Medicare is $10,402 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.

A qualified small business may elect on Form 6765, filed with a timely income tax return, to apply up to $500,000 of its research credit against payroll tax for tax years beginning after December 31, 2022, up from $250,000. The credit is claimed on Form 8974 attached to Form 941, applied first against the employer share of social security tax up to $250,000 per quarter and then against the employer share of Medicare tax.

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.