Fractional Services vs. Hiring an Employee: The Real Numbers
The hire instinct makes sense at first
When you are producing more work than your current setup can handle, hiring feels like the right move. It signals that the business is growing. It feels like a commitment to quality - and for some businesses at certain stages, it genuinely is the right call.
But a lot of businesses post that job before running the real numbers. So let us do that.
What a full-time hire actually costs
Take a mid-level senior designer in Canada. Base salary is somewhere between $70,000 and $95,000. That is the starting point, not the total.
On top of that you have employer CPP and EI contributions, which typically add around 8 to 10 percent to the salary cost. Benefits, including health and dental, run anywhere from $3,000 to $8,000 per year. Paid vacation, statutory holidays, and sick days account for roughly six to ten weeks of paid time where no output is produced. Equipment, software licences, and any workspace costs sit on top of all of that.
Before you have accounted for management time or onboarding, an $85,000 designer is costing you somewhere between $110,000 and $130,000 per year in real terms.... and that assumes the hire works out well.
Part-time employees are not much simpler
A part-time hire sounds like amore practical middle ground. But it comes with its own complications.
In Canada, part-time employees are still entitled to CPP and EI contributions above certain earning thresholds. They are entitled to vacation pay, and their availability is fixed. If you need extra output for a product launch or a busy season, a part-time employee cannot scale up to meet it.
There is also a talent reality here. Strong senior creatives are rarely looking for part-time employment with a single company. The best people want full-time security or the flexibility of a fractional arrangement. A part-time in-house role often attracts candidates who are between other things, rather than genuinely committed to your business.
What fractional actually costs by comparison
A fractional creative subscription gives you a senior team focused on what you need the most right now. We have plans for design, web development, and ad management - all at a fixed monthly rate. No payroll contributions. No benefits. No equipment costs. No management overhead beyond submitting work and reviewing deliverables.
The cost is a fraction of a single full-time employee, but you get the senior level experience you need. When your needs change, you adjust the subscription instead of restructuring a team.
When in-house actually makes sense
An in-house hire makes genuine sense when the volume of work is high enough to keep someone fully occupied, and when deep day-to-day integration outweighs the financial case for staying fractional. For most businesses under a few million in revenue with active but not overwhelming creative needs, that threshold is higher than it feels.
The fractional model tends to be the more efficient path until the volume and operational case for a full hire becomes genuinely clear - and even then a fractional service can help support your employee if the needs increase.
