The salary is not the cost
Employer National Insurance is 15% on earnings above a secondary threshold of £5,000 a year, from 6 April 2025. The Employment Allowance is £10,500, and the £100,000 prior-year-liability cap that used to restrict it was removed on the same date, so it is now available to all eligible employers. It is still not available to a company whose sole director is its only employee liable for secondary Class 1.
Add commission, which in this sector is a real and variable part of the package rather than a bonus, and add the car if you provide one — including the Class 1A National Insurance at 15% on the benefit. What comes out is the figure to compare against fee income, and it is usually meaningfully higher than the number in the offer letter.
Then the question worth asking
How many instructions the role has to convert to cover itself. That is the calculation this tool ends on, because it is the one that decides whether a hire is a growth decision or a hope. A negotiator on £28,000 with commission and a car can easily cost the business £45,000 all in, and at a £3,500 average net fee that is thirteen completions before the role breaks even.
A note on cars
If you buy rather than provide an allowance, the capital allowances position matters. New and unused cars at 0g/km or electric get a 100% first-year allowance. Second-hand electric and anything up to 50g/km go to the main pool, where the writing down allowance fell from 18% to 14% in April 2026. Above 50g/km it is the 6% special rate pool, which is a very slow write-off on an asset that depreciates quickly.
The employment law changes that land on this number next
Several are already in force and several are dated, and between them they change what a hire costs and how much risk sits behind it. Since 6 April 2026, statutory sick pay has had the lower earnings limit and the waiting period removed, so SSP is payable from day one and to lower-paid staff who were previously outside it — which matters more in an industry with Saturday and part-time cover than in most. Paternity leave and unpaid parental leave became day-one rights on the same date, and the collective redundancy protective award doubled.
Two dates worth planning around. From 1 October 2026 the employment tribunal claim time limit rises from three months to six, which roughly doubles the window in which a departing negotiator can bring a claim. From January 2027 the unfair dismissal qualifying period falls to six months, with fire-and-rehire protections and uncapped compensatory awards.
One thing to be careful of: the widely repeated “nine-month statutory probation period” is not something we have been able to substantiate. It is not in the government roadmap, and neither are the agency worker protections people cite alongside it. Plan on the six-month qualifying period, which is confirmed.
Commission is the part that makes this hard to budget
In most sectors a salary calculation is stable and a bonus is a rounding error. In estate agency the commission element is large, variable and correlated with the market — so the year the role costs you most is the year it earns you least, and the fixed costs above do not move at all. That is the argument for knowing the break-even completion count rather than the annual cost: a number of deals is something you can test against a realistic bad quarter, where an annual figure is not.