The paycheck you offer a receptionist is only about 70% of what the hire actually costs your shop each month. Taxes, benefits, PTO, and the quiet extras stack 25–40% on top of gross wages — and most owners don't run that math until the second payroll cycle.
Here's the full breakdown with real example numbers so you can plug in your own.
Say you hire a full-time receptionist at $18/hour, 40 hours a week. These are example figures — swap in your own rates and your state's numbers.
Gross wages: $18 × 2,080 hours = $37,440/year, or $3,120/month.
Now add what the government and the calendar add:
Add it up at the low end: $3,120 + $260 + $30 + $190 = $3,600/month. With any health contribution, you're over $4,000. Your $18/hour receptionist costs you $21–$23/hour for the hours worked — before you count the training time or the day they quit.
That 25–40% markup over gross wages is the rule of thumb accountants commonly give small service businesses, and it matches what most contractors find when they finally add it up.
Here's the number that stings more than the taxes. A full-time receptionist covers 40 hours a week. The week has 168 hours.
You're paying roughly $3,600–$4,200/month for coverage of less than a quarter of the clock. Evenings, weekends, holidays, lunch breaks, sick days, and the weeks between a resignation and a new hire — the phone rings through all of it, and in the garage door business a lot of those rings are emergencies worth $300–$800+ each.
Run your own version: pull your call log for last month and count calls outside 8–5. Most owners who do this exercise are surprised, and not in a good way. If a third of your calls land when no one's paid to answer, the effective cost per answered call is much higher than the hourly math suggests.
This isn't an argument to never hire. If you need someone managing dispatch, ordering springs, and handling customers at the counter, the loaded cost is the cost of doing business — and worth it at the right size.
It's an argument to do the math before you post the job, and to separate the phone-answering problem from the office-work problem. The phone piece — answering every call 24/7, triaging emergencies, capturing name/number/address/issue, booking service windows, texting you a summary — Ava does for $297/month flat, with no payroll taxes, no PTO, and no resignation letter. That's less than one week of a loaded receptionist.
A lot of shops end up with a hybrid: Ava owns the phones around the clock, and the eventual office hire spends their day on dispatch and customers instead of sprinting for a ringing line. When the hire does happen, budget the full loaded number, not the wage — the pillar on the true cost of an office receptionist walks through the whole picture, and what it costs when your receptionist quits covers the expense nobody budgets for at all.
Call the live demo and have Ava call you now — hear exactly what your customers will hear when they call your shop.