# The LAUNCH. Staffing Bill Rate Index

Median pay rates, fully burdened cost and the bill rate required to hit 20%, 25% and 30% gross margin, by recruitment niche and US state. Built on BLS OEWS May 2025 wage data.

Updated: 2026-08-31

## Direct answer

A staffing bill rate is the contractor's pay rate plus employer burden, divided by one minus your target gross margin. At a $30 pay rate with 12.5% burden, a 25% gross margin needs a bill rate of $45.00 — a 50% markup. This index publishes that calculation for every major recruitment niche and US state using published federal wage data.

## Methodology

1. Pay rates are median hourly wages from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025, all industries, national and state level. They are actual published medians, not survey estimates by LAUNCH.
2. Employer burden is applied at 12.5% of pay — 9.5% for employer payroll taxes and 3.0% for workers' compensation — matching the default assumptions in our bill rate calculator. Benefits, PTO and travel costs are excluded and must be added for niches that carry them.
3. Bill rate is calculated as fully burdened cost divided by (1 − target gross margin). Markup is the same bill rate expressed against pay rate alone, which is how most US clients negotiate.
4. Where a state has no published median for an occupation, the row is omitted rather than estimated.

## Download

[Download the complete CSV](https://launch-rec.com/api/public/data/bill-rate-index.csv)

## Attribution

Cite as: LAUNCH. (2026). The LAUNCH. Staffing Bill Rate Index. Launch Found. https://launch-rec.com/data/bill-rate-index