What to pay your first hire

The wage floor is not one number

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour under the Fair Labor Standards Act, and it is close to irrelevant in practice, because most states and many cities set a higher minimum that applies instead. Whatever structure you land on - hourly, per-job, or percentage - it has to clear the actual floor where you operate, and a per-job or piece-rate structure specifically still has to average out to at least that floor for the hours genuinely worked. Check your state and local minimum before doing any of the arithmetic below, because the number that matters is rarely the federal one.

The three structures, and what each one rewards

Hourly. Simple, predictable, and easy for a new hire to understand and trust. What it does not do is reward finishing faster - a hire paid hourly has no built-in reason to move quickly, which is fine for training and can become a real cost once they are experienced.

Per job. Rewards speed directly - more jobs finished, more earned. The risk is quality: a hire paid strictly per job has an incentive to rush, and that incentive needs a real counterweight, whether that is your own spot-checking, customer feedback reaching you directly, or before-and-after photos that make the finished quality visible regardless of how fast it was done.

A percentage of the ticket. Ties pay to what the job actually earned, which means a hire on this structure wants the same thing you want - a job priced right and done well, not just hours logged or boxes checked. It is the hardest to start with, because it requires a hire who trusts your pricing and enough history together to make that trust reasonable.

Most operators start hourly during training and move toward per-job or percentage once a hire is experienced enough to work with less supervision - the shift usually tracks the same point hiring your first helper describes as "consistently turning down work," not a fixed number of weeks.

The cost is more than the wage

Employer-side payroll taxes, workers' compensation insurance, equipment, and - the cost almost nobody puts a number on - the hours you personally spend training, checking, and rescheduling around a new hire's early mistakes all sit on top of whatever hourly figure looks reasonable on paper. Whether this person is genuinely an employee or an independent contractor running their own operation changes which of these costs apply, and that classification question - covered in scheduling two vans - is worth settling before the first paycheck, not after a filing deadline.

Worked, so the shape is concrete

A first hire at $22 an hour, working 25 billable hours a week, generates $550 in wages. Add a reasonable estimate for payroll taxes and workers' comp - commonly 12 to 20 percent on top of wages depending on your state and industry classification - and the real weekly cost lands closer to $620 to $660, before counting your own training and re-scheduling time. That gap between the wage and the real cost is the number to compare against the extra revenue the hire actually enables, not the hourly rate alone.

These percentages are illustrative - get your own state's real payroll tax and workers' comp rates before running this math for real. What you actually net per job.

What Rigsheet does with this

Jobs assigned to a second person on the Pro tier's extra team logins show that person their own day without needing the owner's phone or a shared login, and job history shows who did which job - the record a percentage-of-ticket or per-job pay structure actually needs to calculate pay accurately, without reconstructing it from memory at the end of the week.

Choosing the structure and clearing the wage floor are still yours. The software just keeps the record straight once you have. What each plan includes. · Hiring your first helper.

Questions and answers