OmnentisCost to hire
What does it cost to hire someone to do this?
A fair question, and one worth answering with published numbers rather than a feeling. Below is the fully loaded annual cost of putting an automation engineer on your payroll, built from federal wage and benefit data. Every figure is cited. Change any of them.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn't publish an "automation engineer" occupation. No federal wage series has that title in it. The closest published match is Software Developers (SOC 15-1252), and that is what this page uses. If your job description leans more toward data engineering or IT operations, substitute the published wage for that occupation instead — the arithmetic below is the same.
Work it out
Your numbers, not ours.
It opens on the BLS mean annual wage for San Diego. Move anything you disagree with — nothing here is fixed, and the two sources are printed in full further down so you can check the starting figures against the originals.
The BLS mean annual wage for Software Developers in San Diego–Chula Vista–Carlsbad, CA. Drag it to your own number.
28% is what the BLS employer-cost table works out to for this kind of role, once paid leave is left out of it. The derivation is below.
Source A
Where the salary comes from.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS), May 2025, Software Developers, SOC 15-1252. Retrieved 2026-08-21 from the published OEWS data files, metro area code 41740.
Cross-checked against O*NET OnLine, also a Department of Labor site, which reports the same San Diego metro median of $163,270 and the same national median of $135,980, citing Bureau of Labor Statistics 2025 wage data.
| Figure | United States | San Diego metro |
|---|---|---|
| Employment | 1,687,890 | 20,610 |
| Mean annual wage | $148,100 | $163,300 |
| Median annual wage | $135,980 | $163,270 |
| 25th percentile | $105,210 | $128,590 |
| 75th percentile | $171,980 | $193,980 |
| Mean hourly wage | $71.20 | $78.51 |
Source B
Where the 28% on top comes from.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026 (USDL-26-0827, released June 12, 2026). Table 4 — private industry, management, professional and related occupations. Read from the primary release on 2026-08-21. All figures are dollars per hour worked.
| Component | $ / hour | % of total |
|---|---|---|
| Total compensation | 78.10 | 100.0 |
| Wages and salaries | 53.50 | 68.5 |
| Paid leave | 7.34 | 9.4 |
| Supplemental pay | 3.60 | 4.6 |
| Insurance | 5.73 | 7.3 |
| Retirement and savings | 2.89 | 3.7 |
| Legally required benefits | 5.03 | 6.4 |
| Total benefits | 24.61 | 31.5 |
The arithmetic, in full
An advertised annual salary already pays for vacation. Counting paid leave again on top of it would charge you twice for the same thing, so paid leave belongs on the salary side of the line, not the employer-cost side.
Salary equivalent: wages and salaries plus paid leave, 53.50 + 7.34 = 60.84.
Employer's additions: supplemental pay, insurance, retirement and savings, and legally required benefits, 3.60 + 5.73 + 2.89 + 5.03 = 17.25.
17.25 ÷ 60.84 = 28.4%, rounded down to 28% as the starting point.
Reading the same table the other way — total benefits over wages and salaries, 24.61 ÷ 53.50 — gives 46%. That reading counts paid leave as an extra cost on top of a salary that already includes it. We use the conservative number, and the slider goes to 60% if you'd rather not.
Questions
Three honest questions.
Why software developer and not automation engineer?
Because the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not publish an "automation engineer" occupation. Software Developers, SOC 15-1252, is the closest published match, and it is the one used here. If your job description leans more toward data engineering or IT operations, the published wage for those occupations is different, and you should substitute it.
Does this include recruiting and ramp-up?
No. Recruiter fees, the time your own people spend interviewing, and the months before a new hire is productive are all real costs, and none of them are in this figure. We have left them out because we do not have a published source to cite for them, and a number we made up would be worse than a gap.
Is this what Omnentis costs?
No. This page is about what hiring costs, not what we cost. It uses published federal wage data and your own inputs, and nothing else. If you want to know what a piece of work would cost, that is a conversation about the specific work, and it starts with an email.
Send this to someone
Want to talk about the actual work?
This page deliberately stops at what hiring costs. If you'd rather talk about the specific job that's eating the time — what it is, how often it happens, and what it would take to hand it off — that's a twenty-minute conversation, and it starts with an email.