What a receptionist actually costs a home-service business

When the phone starts costing you jobs, the obvious fix is to hire someone to answer it. It is a reasonable instinct and for some shops it is the right call. It is also the decision most often made on the wage alone, which is the smallest number in the whole calculation.

Here is what the arithmetic actually looks like, using published figures rather than estimates.

Start with the wage

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the median pay for receptionists at $17.90 an hour, or $37,230 a year, as of May 2024. Median means half of receptionists earn more than that. In a tight local labour market, or anywhere with a high cost of living, you will be bidding above it.

That figure is the national midpoint for the occupation, not a quote for your town. Look up your own state on the BLS site before you budget against it.

Then add what sits on top of the wage

Nobody costs an employee at their salary. The parts that are fixed by law are easy to pin down. Employer-side Social Security and Medicare come to 7.65% of wages, which on the median figure is about $2,848 a year. That alone takes the number to roughly $40,078 before anything optional.

The rest varies too much to quote honestly, and you should be suspicious of any article that gives you a single multiplier. Depending on your state and what you offer, you are also looking at:

• →State and federal unemployment insurance, which varies by state and by your own claims history.
• →Workers compensation, priced by state and by class code.
• →Any benefits you provide, which is the widest variable of all.
• →Paid time off, which is not an extra cost so much as fewer hours for the same salary.
• →Recruiting and training, and again each time the role turns over.

Now the part almost nobody prices in

A full-time receptionist covers roughly 40 hours. There are 168 hours in a week. That is about 24% of the week covered, which leaves roughly 76% of it uncovered, and the uncovered portion is not randomly distributed.

It is every night, every weekend, and every holiday. Which is to say it is precisely when a furnace dies, a pipe bursts, or a panel trips, and precisely when the caller is most motivated and least interested in shopping around. You have hired coverage for the hours you were already most likely to catch the phone yourself.

The gaps do not stop there. One receptionist is one call at a time, so the second caller during a morning rush still hits voicemail. Add sick days, holidays and vacation, and the desk is empty for a few more weeks a year. When the role turns over you are uncovered until you have hired and trained again.

When hiring is genuinely the right answer

None of this makes hiring wrong. It makes it a specific tool for a specific job. A receptionist is the right call when:

• →You have a physical location where customers walk in and need greeting.
• →The role is genuinely more than the phone, and covers scheduling, invoicing, follow-ups and paperwork that would otherwise land on you.
• →Your calls routinely need human judgment, negotiation, or careful handling of an upset customer.
• →Your call volume during business hours is high enough to keep a person genuinely busy.

If most of those are true, hire. A good person at the front desk does things no software does, and it is not a close contest.

The honest comparison

If what you actually need is for the phone to be answered, the comparison looks like this. These are not equivalent products, and the table is only fair if you read the last row.

Billed annually at $79 a month, the Merit figure is $948 a year. The gap is large enough that the interesting question is not which is cheaper. It is whether you are hiring a person to do a job a person is needed for, or hiring a person because the phone keeps ringing.

What answering actually requires

Merit is an inbound AI receptionist. You forward your existing business line, keeping your number and your provider, with no porting and no new hardware. It answers every call 24/7 in a natural voice and tells callers it is your assistant.

It captures the caller name, number and reason and texts you that summary the moment the call ends. It takes several calls at once, so a rush does not produce a busy signal. It answers from the information you give it, such as your hours, service area and pricing, and takes a message rather than guessing when a question falls outside that. Every call is recorded and callers receive an automatic consent notice. On the Team plan it books the appointment onto your calendar while the caller is still on the line.

What it does not do is greet a walk-in, chase an invoice, or read the room with a furious customer. If those are the job, the job is a hire.

The bottom line

Price the hire properly before you compare anything: the median wage, plus the 7.65% you owe in employer payroll taxes, plus whatever your state and your benefits add on top. Then look at which hours you are actually buying, and ask whether the nights and weekends you are leaving uncovered are where your emergency calls come from.

If the answer is that you need the phone answered rather than a desk staffed, that is a much cheaper problem than it looks. See what missed calls are costing you first at mavrick.pro/missed-call-calculator, or compare the options at mavrick.pro/ai-receptionist-vs-virtual-receptionist.

Start your 7-day free trial. There is no charge until the trial ends, and if you cancel before then you will not be billed. Keep your number and set up in minutes at mavrick.pro/onboarding.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook, Receptionists, median pay $17.90 per hour and $37,230 per year, May 2024. Employer Social Security and Medicare rate of 7.65% is the statutory combined employer share.