What A Salesperson Actually Costs In Australia In 2026

Ask a business owner what a salesperson costs and you will get a salary figure. Ask their accountant the same question twelve months later and you will get a different one.

The gap between those two numbers is where most hiring decisions go wrong. Not because anyone is being dishonest, but because the salary is the only part of the cost that arrives as a single, quotable number. Everything else turns up later, in pieces, from different directions.

The short version: a $110,000 business development hire costs roughly $143,300 in year one once superannuation, recruitment and tooling are counted. That is before commission, and before the three to four months it takes most people to reach full output.

Below is that number itemised. Australian figures, current rates, and the parts that never make it into the budget.

The salary is not the cost

Published salary data for a business development manager in Australia is genuinely all over the place. Indeed puts the average near $104,000. Glassdoor puts it around $135,000. SalaryExpert, which weights toward senior and metro roles, goes higher still.

That spread is not sloppy data. It reflects a real range, because "BDM" covers everyone from a two years experience appointment setter to someone carrying a seven figure number. For a mid market Melbourne role, someone who can genuinely prospect, qualify and close without supervision, $110,000 base is a fair and fairly conservative figure. That is the number used throughout below.

It is also the last simple number in this article.

What you can budget for

Four costs are predictable enough to put in a spreadsheet before you advertise the role.

Superannuation

The superannuation guarantee is 12% for 2026 to 2027. It reached 12% on 1 July 2025 and that is the final scheduled increase, so this number is now stable. On $110,000 that is $13,200.

One change worth knowing about if you have not caught it: from 1 July 2026, Payday Super requires employers to pay superannuation within seven business days of each payday rather than quarterly. It does not change what you owe. It does change when it leaves your account, and for a business used to holding super for up to three months, that is a real working capital shift.

Recruitment

Australian agencies typically charge 15 to 20% of the package for junior roles, 18 to 25% for mid level professional roles, and north of 20% for senior or hard to fill positions. Sales roles sit awkwardly in that range because they are notoriously difficult to fill well.

At 15%, the bottom of the range, a $110,000 hire costs $16,500 to recruit. Budget higher if you want a specialist sales recruiter, and note that the fee is usually payable on placement, not on the person working out.

Tools

A laptop, a phone, a CRM seat, an email sequencing tool, a dialler and a LinkedIn Sales Navigator licence. Individually all small, together $3,600 a year is a realistic figure and easy to exceed.

Base salary

$110,000, before commission. Commission sits on top of every number in this article and is excluded throughout, because it is earned against revenue rather than spent against budget.

$143,300 before a single deal closes. That is the number most people mean when they say "we're paying them $110k".

What you cannot budget for

Three more costs are real, large, and impossible to put a confident number against in advance. Ignoring them because they are hard to quantify is how a sensible hire becomes an expensive one.

Ramp

A new salesperson does not produce at target on day one. They need to learn your product, your market, your objections and your buyers. Three to four months is normal for a mid market B2B role, longer if the sale is technical or the average deal takes ninety days to close.

During that time you are paying full cost for partial output. It is the single largest hidden expense in the whole exercise, and it is the one that never appears in a budget line.

Your time

Somebody has to write the job ad, sit the interviews, do the onboarding, build the training, run the one to ones and manage the performance. In most businesses under fifty people, that somebody is the owner.

If you are the best salesperson in the business, and you usually are, every hour spent managing a new hire is an hour not spent closing. That cost is invisible because it never leaves your bank account. It leaves your pipeline instead.

The one that does not work out

This is the risk nobody prices in, and it is the one that actually hurts.

Say the hire leaves at month six. You have paid roughly $55,000 of salary, $6,600 of super, the full $16,500 recruitment fee and the $3,600 of tooling. That is about $82,000, and you are exactly where you started, except now you are six months behind and about to pay the recruitment fee again.

The real number

$143,300 in fixed cost, three to four months before meaningful output, a significant chunk of the owner's attention, and roughly $82,000 at risk if it goes wrong in the first half of the year.

None of that makes hiring wrong. It makes hiring a decision worth eight minutes of arithmetic before you post the ad, which is roughly seven and a half minutes more than most businesses give it.

The bits that depend on you

Two further costs apply to some businesses and not others, so they sit outside the headline number.

WorkCover. In Victoria the average premium rate for 2026 to 2027 is 1.8% of rateable remuneration, held at that level for the fourth year running. On a $110,000 salary that is roughly $1,980, though your actual rate depends on your industry classification and claims history.

Payroll tax. In Victoria the threshold is $1,000,000 in Australian wages, with a rate of 4.85% for metropolitan employers and 1.2125% for regional ones. Below the threshold you pay nothing, which covers most businesses reading this. Above it, adding a $110,000 salary adds roughly $5,335 a year in metropolitan Victoria. Thresholds and rates differ in every state, so check your own.

For a business over the payroll tax threshold in metropolitan Melbourne, the year one figure is closer to $150,600.

What you actually get for it

Worth converting the cost into something more useful than an annual figure.

There are 260 weekdays in a year. Take out four weeks of annual leave, ten days of personal leave and Victoria's thirteen public holidays and you are left with about 217 working days. At $143,300, that is roughly $660 a day.

Except in year one they are not productive for all of them. Strip out four months of ramp and you have around 145 days of genuine output, which puts the first year cost closer to $990 per productive day.

Year two is much better, which is exactly why retention matters more than recruitment.

When hiring is still right

It would be convenient for us to argue that nobody should ever hire a salesperson. That is not true, and you would not believe it anyway.

Hire when most of these are true:

• You have consistent lead volume already, so there is something for them to work on from week one.
• You have a sales process that works, and you are hiring someone to run it rather than invent it.
• Somebody in the business has the time and the ability to manage them properly.
• You have twelve months of runway for the role, so a slow start does not become a crisis.
• The volume of work genuinely justifies a full time person.

If three or more of those are missing, you are not really hiring a salesperson. You are hoping one will arrive and fix the sales function for you, and that is a $143,300 bet on a stranger.

What to do with this

Before you advertise, do the eight minutes of arithmetic. Put the real number in the spreadsheet, not the salary. Then ask what else that money could buy.

For context, a fractional arrangement like ours runs at $5,000 a month, which is $60,000 a year in fixed cost, or about 42% of a hire. Commission sits on top, but commission sits on top of a hire too, so the honest comparison is fixed cost against fixed cost. The difference is that the fixed part is smaller, there is no recruitment fee, no ramp, and no lock-in if it is not working.

That is our answer and we have an obvious interest in it. The arithmetic above is true regardless of who you decide to give the work to.

Common questions