"We pay our front desk $18 an hour" is how most owners price the role. It's also wrong — not dishonestly, just incompletely. The wage is the visible line; the invoice keeps going. Here's the whole calculation, step by step, so you can run it with your own numbers.
Before the comparison: answering the phone is one seat's worth of a much bigger job. What we actually build is one system that runs the whole digital side of a business — the answering, then the follow-up, the reviews, the rebooking, the reporting — so the honest comparison isn't "AI vs. receptionist." It's "one system vs. the machinery a business runs by hand."
Step 1: the base wage
Start with what the market pays. The BLS puts the median receptionist wage at $17.90 an hour — $37,230 a year as of May 2024. Your market may run higher; use your real number. Full time is 2,080 paid hours a year.
Your line: hourly wage × 2,080.
Step 2: payroll taxes
You pay taxes on top of the wage: the employer share of FICA is 7.65% (Social Security plus Medicare), before federal and state unemployment tax and workers' comp. On a $37,440 salary, FICA alone is about $2,864 a year.
Your line: wages × 7.65%, plus your unemployment and workers' comp rates.
Step 3: benefits
Health insurance, retirement match, paid leave. The BLS measures this directly: for private-industry workers, benefits account for 30.1% of total employer compensation costs, with wages the other 69.9% (March 2026). That benchmark includes the legally required items from step 2, which gives you a clean shortcut: wages ÷ 0.7 ≈ total compensation. A modest-benefits small business will land under the national average; an employer paying most of a family health premium will land over it.
Your line: your actual benefits spend — or the ÷ 0.7 shortcut as a sanity check.
Step 4: PTO coverage
Those 2,080 paid hours are not 2,080 covered hours. Subtract vacation, sick days, and holidays — call it three to four weeks — and you're near 1,900 hours at the desk. The phone doesn't take those weeks off, so you either pay someone else to cover (temp, overtime) or the calls go unanswered and cost you invisibly. Either way it's a real number.
Your line: coverage cost for ~3 weeks a year, or an honest estimate of what uncovered weeks leak.
Step 5: turnover
Front-desk roles churn. Gallup pegs the cost of replacing an employee at one-half to two times their annual salary once you count recruiting, training, lost productivity, and the empty-chair weeks. Even at the low end, a $37,440 role replaced every three years adds roughly $6,200 a year, amortized.
Your line: (salary × 0.5) ÷ expected years of tenure.
Step 6: the hours you didn't buy
Now the quiet one. A week has 168 hours; a full-time schedule covers 40. Everything you just totaled buys coverage for about 24% of the hours your phone can ring. The other 128 — evenings, weekends, lunch, the second simultaneous call — still belong to voicemail. That's not a cost line; it's a reminder of what the spend does and doesn't purchase.
Two worked examples (both hypothetical)
Example A — hypothetical $18/hour hire. Wages $37,440. The ÷ 0.7 shortcut puts taxes-and-benefits-loaded compensation near $53,500. Add low-end turnover amortized over three years, ~$6,200. Total: roughly $60,000 a year — for about 1,900 desk hours, which works out to ~$31 per covered hour, covering 24% of the week.
Example B — hypothetical $22/hour metro hire. Wages $45,760; loaded compensation near $65,500. Turnover at the low end over a two-year tenure adds ~$11,400 a year. Total: roughly $77,000 a year — same 40 of 168 hours.
Your numbers will differ; that's the point. Fill in the five lines and see where you land. Most owners find the "$18-an-hour hire" is a $55–75K commitment before anyone answers a single after-hours call.
What this math doesn't say
It doesn't say don't hire. A front desk doing multi-role, in-person work — greeting walk-ins, wrangling paperwork, reading faces, defusing the upset customer — earns every dollar of that loaded cost, because most of the job was never the phone. If that's your desk, hire, and gladly.
The math says something narrower: know what you're paying, and know what it covers. If the main job you're hiring for is "answer the phone," you're paying $60–77K for 24% coverage of the thing you actually wanted. That's the moment to compare alternatives honestly — including an AI receptionist for the 128 hours no hire covers, alongside whatever humans your business genuinely needs. If you want to run your numbers with a second pair of eyes, book a walkthrough and bring this list filled in.
Book a 15-minute walkthrough — or call (626) 365-4946 and hear the alternative answer for itself; yes, an AI picks up, and that's the point.