Home › Calculators › Sources

Where these figures come from

Every number the in-house calculator uses, the range it sits in, and the source it came from. Nothing here is an audited industry average.

Read 25 August 2026. The two halves of this calculator are not equally solid, and the Source type column says which is which. The employment figures are government data — the ABS via Jobs and Skills Australia, and the ATO. The agency figures are mostly price guides published by agencies about their own market, which is marketing rather than independent research. They are useful for order of magnitude and no more. Figures move; check the source before relying on any of them. This is general information, not financial, workplace-relations or tax advice.

What an agency costs

Indicative Australian market benchmarks, not averages. The calculator uses the middle column.

Service	Australian range	Calculator benchmark	Source type	Source
Social media management	$800–$3,000+	$1,500/mth	Agency price guide	Zestly
Content creation — photography and video	$1,500–$8,500	$3,500/mth	Agency price guide, Brisbane-specific	Bris Social
Ads management	$800–$3,500+	$2,500/mth	Agency price guide	Adstralis
Email marketing	$800–$6,000+	$1,500/mth	Agency price guide	YEWS
Website management, SEO and AEO	$1,200–$3,000+	$2,000/mth	Agency price guide	LINK Marketing
Website design	$2,500–$25,000+	$8,000 project	Published price index	Digital Nomads HQ

What employing someone costs

This half is government data, and is the firmer of the two.

Item	Figure	Basis	Source type	Source
Base salary	$101,764/yr	Median full-time earnings for advertising and marketing professionals, $1,957 a week × 52.	Government data, ABS-backed	Jobs and Skills Australia
Superannuation	12.00%	The super guarantee rate for 1 July 2026 to 30 June 2027. Unchanged since 1 July 2025. From 1 July 2026 it is calculated on qualifying earnings under Payday Super rather than ordinary time earnings.	Government, statutory rate	ATO
Total used by the calculator	$113,976/yr	$101,764 plus 12% superannuation. Nothing else is included — see the assumptions below.	Calculated	—

What this calculator assumes

Ads management is a fee, not ad spend. The $2,500 benchmark is what an agency charges to run the advertising. It is not what you spend on the advertising itself. A business paying $3,000 a month in media and $2,500 in management is spending $5,500 — but only $2,500 of that is the agency fee, and only that part is comparable to a salary. Media spend does not disappear when the work moves in house.

Website design is a one-off project, shown spread over twelve months. $8,000 ÷ 12 is $667 a month. That is an amortised estimate for comparison only, not a retainer, and not something an agency would bill monthly. It is included in the annual total once, not twelve times.

Employing someone is costed at salary plus superannuation only. Nothing else is added. A real hire also carries recruitment, equipment and software, payroll tax where the employer is above the threshold, workers’ compensation, leave cover and the management time of whoever they report to. The figure here is deliberately the conservative one: the true cost of employing is higher, not lower.

One person is not six disciplines, and the calculator prices that in. Social media management, photography, video, paid ads, email marketing and technical SEO are different jobs. An agency fee buys a fraction of several specialists rather than all of one person, so the in-house side grows with how many disciplines you are replacing:

One full-time marketer, plus 0.3 of a person for every discipline beyond the first three. A single hire can reasonably carry three. Three disciplines therefore cost one salary, not more; the fourth adds 0.3, and so does each one after it. Selecting everything — five services with both content trades, seven disciplines — models 2.2 people at $250,747, which is the calculator’s ceiling.

Photography and videography count separately; content creation itself does not. A photographer and a videographer are not the same hire, so each counts as a discipline in its own right. Content creation is the container those two sit in, and counting it as well would charge for the same work twice, so it adds nothing on its own. It still carries its $3,500 agency benchmark, because the agency does still bill for it.

Every output is an estimate built from what you enter. The calculator does not know your business. It takes the retainer you set and the disciplines you tick, applies the benchmarks and the headcount model above, and returns a comparison — not a quote, not a valuation and not a recommendation to act. Change one input and the answer changes with it, which is the point of it being a calculator rather than an article.

That model is an assumption, and it is ours. The 0.3, and the judgement that one hire covers two disciplines before it starts, are not published, not sourced and not an industry standard. They are stated rather than buried because they move the headline number more than anything else on this page. If you think a discipline takes more or less than a third of a person in your business, or that one hire can carry more or fewer than three, the number should move with you. Everything else on this page is sourced; this is judgement.

The agency benchmarks are indicative, and the sources have an interest. Most of the pricing above is published by agencies describing their own market. It is the best available public guidance and it is not independent research. A deep-research report already in our own files puts the point plainly: there is no responsible universal Australian agency-price benchmark. Treat these as a starting point for a conversation, not a quote.

General references

Used for the cross-market picture and for the ranges above.

Back to the calculator