A salesperson who earns $70,000 in base pay and commission costs a company about $110,000 to $125,000 in the first year. The pay is the biggest line, but benefits and payroll taxes add roughly a third, a recruiter adds about a fifth of salary if you use one, and the rest is tools and the time of whoever manages the person. This page builds that number line by line, with the source for each line and a filled-in table at the end.
It covers a general salesperson or sales rep, the person who finds buyers, sells to them and handles the account. It is not the same as the cost of a junior outbound hire, which has its own page: how much an SDR costs. If you are weighing a commission-only arrangement, hiring a salesperson on commission covers that structure.
Line 1: base pay and commission
The best public number for what sales reps are paid is the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey, the May 2025 data. Three occupation codes cover most people a growing business would call a sales rep.
| BLS occupation (May 2025) | Employment | 10th percentile | Median | Mean | 90th percentile |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 41-3091 Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel | 1,256,010 | $37,980 | $69,990 | $82,430 | $148,840 |
| 41-4012 Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Except Technical and Scientific Products | 1,238,190 | $39,090 | $72,080 | $82,530 | $137,550 |
| 41-4011 Sales Representatives, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Technical and Scientific Products | 284,800 | $52,600 | $104,920 | $119,730 | $200,440 |
Pick the code that matches what you sell. Selling a service to other businesses is 41-3091. Selling a product that a wholesaler or manufacturer makes is 41-4012, or 41-4011 if the buyer needs technical or scientific knowledge to understand it.
Here is what those figures include. The survey counts wages as straight-time gross pay, and BLS states that this includes incentive pay such as commissions and production bonuses. It excludes overtime, severance, nonproduction bonuses and the employer's cost of benefits. So the $82,430 mean is pay including commission, before any of the lines below. Notice also how wide the range is: for the services code, the middle half of reps earn somewhere between about $48,000 and $100,000 a year, and the top tenth earn more than $148,000. These are national figures across all employers. A first sales hire at a young company can land well on either side of the median, depending on city, industry and how much of the pay is commission.
Line 2: payroll taxes and benefits
The wage figures above leave out what the employer pays on top. The Bureau of Labor Statistics measures that in its Employer Costs for Employee Compensation report. The latest release, published September 9, 2026, covers June 2026. In its table of private industry workers by occupational group, sales and related occupations cost employers $26.99 an hour in wages and salaries and $8.86 an hour in benefits, out of $35.85 in total compensation. The benefits break down as:
- Legally required benefits, the payments an employer must make by law: $2.69 an hour
- Insurance: $2.16
- Paid leave: $2.11
- Supplemental pay: $1.05
- Retirement and savings: $0.85
Benefits of $8.86 against wages of $26.99 is 32.8 percent. Applied to a $70,000 salesperson, that is about $22,980 a year. This page uses the sales figure because it is the series for sales jobs in private industry. The same release's average for all private industry workers is higher, $14.07 in benefits on $32.82 in wages, or about 43 percent, because it takes in every occupation. The sales group also includes retail salespeople and cashiers, so a full-time rep with a health plan can cost more than the group average. Treat 32.8 percent as an estimate for a typical employer. A company with no retirement plan and a thin health plan pays less, and one with a generous plan pays more.
Line 3: recruiting
You can find the person yourself, through your network and a job post, and pay mostly in your own time. Or you can pay a recruiter. Staffing Industry Analysts, a research firm for the staffing business, reported from its 2021 survey of North American staffing firms that the most common direct hire fee is 20 percent of salary, charged by 42 percent of firms. Professional staffing firms reported a midrange of 18 to 22 percent, and firms that specialize in direct hire 20 to 25 percent. That is a 2021 survey published in April 2022, so quotes today may differ, and you should check whether the fee is on base pay only or on total first-year pay. On $70,000, 20 percent is $14,000.
Your own time is the other half. Writing the post, reading applications, interviewing and checking references adds up to a few working days. The table below assumes 30 hours at a value of $75 an hour. Use your own rate.
Line 4: ramp time
A new rep does not sell at full speed on day one. They need to learn what you sell, who buys it, the objections and your tools. How long that takes depends on the length of your sales cycle. If a deal takes four months to close, nobody can show a closed deal in month two. Published ramp figures vary a lot from one survey to the next and are mostly for software companies with sales teams, so I will not quote one. Take the sales cycle you actually have and add the weeks it takes to learn the product.
For the table, assume three months before steady output. You pay full pay and benefits for all of them. On this hire that is about a quarter of $92,980, or $23,245, spent while the person produces little. It is not an extra line, because it is already inside the pay and benefits. It matters because it moves the point where the hire starts paying back well into the second half of the year.
Line 5: tools and management time
A rep needs a laptop, a phone, a CRM seat, an email account and usually a data subscription for finding contacts. The table assumes $300 a month. Your real number depends on the tools you pick, so price them before you hire.
Management time is the line people leave out. Someone has to set targets, listen to calls, read emails before they go out, and meet the person weekly. Three hours a week is modest for a new rep. At $75 an hour of the manager's time, that is $11,700 over 52 weeks. If the manager is you, the cost shows up as work you are not doing, not as an invoice.
The filled-in table
Here is the first-year cost for one fictional hire: a services salesperson at a made-up logistics software company, paid $70,000 at target.
| Line | Assumption | First year |
|---|---|---|
| Base pay and commission | Plan paid at target, set near the BLS median for services sales reps ($69,990) | $70,000 |
| Payroll taxes and benefits | 32.8 percent on top of pay, the BLS rate for private industry sales and related occupations (Line 2) | $22,980 |
| Recruiter fee | 20 percent of $70,000 if an agency finds the person, the most common fee in SIA's 2021 survey | $14,000 |
| Your time hiring | 30 hours of posting, screening and interviews, valued at $75 an hour | $2,250 |
| Tools and equipment | Laptop, phone, CRM seat, data subscription, $300 a month | $3,600 |
| Management time | 3 hours a week for 52 weeks, valued at $75 an hour | $11,700 |
| Total with an agency | About $10,380 a month | $124,530 |
| Total if you find the person yourself | Drops the recruiter fee, about $9,210 a month | $110,530 |
The arithmetic: $70,000 plus $22,980 is $92,980. Add $14,000, $2,250, $3,600 and $11,700, and the total is $124,530. Replace each assumption with your own figures and the total moves with them.
A way to sanity-check it: if each customer is worth $5,000 a year to you in revenue, $124,530 means the hire has to bring in about 25 customers in the first year just to cover the cost, and about 50 if your margin is half of revenue. The first quarter of ramp makes that harder.
The cost of a miss-hire
A miss-hire is the cost people discount, because sales results are slow to show and a weak quarter looks like a slow quarter. Say this hire leaves, or is let go, after six months. You have already spent half the pay and benefits ($46,490), half the tools ($1,800) and half the management time ($5,850), which is $54,140. Add the recruiter fee and your hiring time and it is $70,390. Some agencies replace a placement for free within a set period or refund part of the fee, so read the contract before you sign. After that you start the search again, and you pay another ramp. Nothing in this table is a prediction that your hire will fail. It is the reason founders find a cheaper way to test the idea before they commit.
What the same money buys instead
If you take away the person, the work stays. Someone still has to find buyers, write to them, follow up and get meetings booked. The options, from cheapest to most expensive, look like this.
- Do it yourself. It costs your time and nothing else. It works until your calendar fills, which is the point at which most founders start looking at the numbers above.
- Software. An AI salesperson or an outbound tool is billed monthly, and the prices are published, so you can check the real number rather than an estimate. It covers the repeatable work, not the sales meeting or the negotiation.
- A part-time or commission-only rep. You pay for the hours or the results rather than a full package. A cheap alternative to hiring a salesperson compares these options.
- An agency. A retainer for outsourced outbound, usually with a minimum term. Multiply the monthly fee by the term to see the real commitment.
- The full-time hire, at the cost above, which is the right answer once good conversations outnumber your hours and each deal is involved enough to need an owner.
These are not equal substitutes. A person can negotiate, read a room and build a relationship over years. Software cannot. The useful question is which part of the job you are missing before you pay for all of it.
Rocketship is the software option from the list above, and we make it. It finds buyers, emails them from your own Gmail, follows up and books the meeting. Launch is $24.99 a month, which is $299.88 over a year, and Mission Control is $1,499 a month for much higher volume. See the plans, or try it for 7 days and compare what comes back against the table.