In the UK, a £45k/yr employee pays their own tax and gets a take-home of £35k.

The employer pays £6k for National Insurance (atop the employee's NI contributions). Pension: 2-3k. Apprenticeship levy is £300. 3yr-amortised recruitment fee is £4000. Hardware costs: £1000. Office space £5000. Software/tools: £2500. Benefits: £1500. Training: £1000. Other admin overheads £500.

You pay that person for ~250 working-days, but they only attend for ~220, due to annual leave and sick pay, so you get around £62k worth of attendance out of that person in exchange for £70k, of which the employee sees £35k.

Example from Germany: Employer also pays a share of health insurance, unemployment insurance, public pension and elder care insurance.

This is not visible on your payslip, i.e. if you earn 5k€ brutto, the employer has to pay these shares on top of that.

In the UK, employers pay a stealth tax of 15% (recently increased from 13.8%) on top of the quoted salary minus the first £5k (recently decreased from £9,100.)

So your "£50k" salary actually costs your employer £56,750, and that's before all the other expenses mentioned elsewhere in this thread such as hardware, office rent etc.

A quick google tells me that software devs usually count for 20% to 40% of the total workforce in a software company. The rest is overhead that increases with every added dev.

In the US, over and above salary, payroll taxes add 7.65%, pension contributions might be up to 5%, and employer healthcare and other insurance contributions can be in the thousands, plus other benefits, equity compensation, and per-employee software licensing, and lots of people just estimate 2x salary as the “total cost” of an employee, although that probably overstates it a bit.

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