What does a receptionist really cost your business?

The salary number is rarely the hardest part — it's the number everyone negotiates on. The hard part is everything around it. Employer-side payroll taxes add 7.65% immediately. Health insurance for a single employee runs $6,000–$12,000 per year in employer contributions. Two weeks of paid time off and sick days add another week of wages with no output. Recruiting and onboarding a replacement — when turnover happens, and it does — can run $5,000–$15,000 all in.

The coverage gap is the other dimension that doesn't show up in the salary figure. A full-time hire gives you roughly 2,080 hours per year of coverage — 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, minus holidays and time off. OwlCall covers 8,760 hours per year. The difference is your evenings, your weekends, your peak-hour overflow, and any day your receptionist is out. For a service business, those are the hours that determine how many jobs you win.

The calculus is straightforward for most service businesses where the receptionist role is primarily answering calls. For businesses that also need in-person presence — managing walk-in traffic, handling physical paperwork — a human hire may still make sense for those specific functions. OwlCall covers the phone answering workload at a fraction of the cost, and many businesses run both.

If you're also tracking revenue lost to missed calls, the missed call calculator shows you what's walking out the door every month. For a detailed breakdown of the hiring vs. OwlCall decision, see the full comparison page.