How much does an employee really cost?
It’s a question every employer eventually has to answer – and, on a larger scale, a telling indicator of a country’s competitiveness. Yet the “super-gross wage” so often cited in Slovak debates is not the same thing as the true cost of employment. Labor law loads employers with a whole range of obligations, each carrying its own price tag. While calculators for gross and net wages are common, a comprehensive tool capturing the full cost of an employee was, for a long time, missing.
That’s the gap INESS set out to close with a tool called Employee Price, a purpose-built online calculator that finally puts a real number on what hiring costs in Slovakia.
The employee cost calculator draws on 14 parameters entered by the user. Beyond the contractual wage, these include the number of shifts, hours worked on weekends or overtime, company size, the job’s risk category, and even voluntary extras like 13th and 14th month pay or above-statutory leave.
Every input is run against current legislation, and the headline result is striking in its simplicity: the true cost of an employee per hour actually worked.
Curious about the methodology behind the numbers? Find the full breakdown on the project’s website.
