One of our Miami team members, Vivianne, gets some version of this question from candidates almost every week:
If you’re making $31 an hour off me, why am I only seeing $20?
It’s a fair question, and most agencies answer it with a shrug or offer a vague line about covering “overhead.” Candidates rarely get a real answer, mostly because most agencies don’t want to give one. The spread between what a client pays and what a candidate takes home looks, from the outside, like pure profit sitting in a drawer somewhere.
It isn’t, and we’d rather show you exactly where it goes than ask you to take our word for it.
Every placement has two numbers. The bill rate is what the client pays TempExperts per hour worked. The pay rate is what you, the candidate, take home per hour before taxes. The important thing to note is that neither number tells the whole story on its own. The bill rate isn’t what we keep, and the pay rate isn’t the full cost of employing you. The real picture only shows up when you look at what sits between them.
The gap between them is what we call the spread. Here is a real, working example of what that spread looks like, utilizing actual deal economics.
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The Base Math:
Example: Bill Rate: $31 per hour / Pay Rate: $20 per hour = The Spread: $11 per hour
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And so, a quick word on what those lines actually mean.
The payroll burden isn’t optional or negotiable. It’s the same employer-side Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment tax any employer owes on any paycheck, staffing or otherwise. Workers’ compensation varies by the type of work: a warehouse role with real physical risk costs more to insure than a desk job, and that’s reflected placement by placement, not applied as a flat rate. The funding and processing line covers something candidates rarely think about. We pay you weekly whether or not the client has paid us yet, which means we’re financing payroll in the gap between those two events, and that financing has a real cost. Liability insurance is the smallest line, but it’s still a real one.
Then there are benefits. Based on our actual 2026 usage, across everyone enrolled in some form of coverage this year (medical, dental, vision, and 401k,) works out to 67 cents per hour. That’s not an estimate. It is what we’ve actually spent, year to date.
What’s left after all of that is gross profit, and if the story stopped there, the story would still be incomplete. Gross profit isn’t what we walk away with. Out of that comes the cost of the people and systems that actually run your placement. This includes the recruiter who found you, the team managing the account, the software, the office, and the everyday cost of staying in business. Once that’s accounted for, using a profitability benchmark typical for agencies our size, what’s actually left over lands somewhere around $1.86 to $2.48 an hour.
That’s the real number. Everything before it was overhead. Overhead we don’t get to keep.
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The One Thing We Don’t Love Admitting
Here’s a case where making the numbers work would have meant making the wrong call. We had a client in the healthcare support space ask us to meet a bill rate that simply didn’t work with the pay rate required to attract the level of candidate they wanted. We could have made the numbers work by reducing candidate pay by $2–$3 an hour, but we didn’t believe the talent was available at that rate. Rather than squeeze the candidate to preserve the deal, we walked away from the business. We were giving up roughly a 20–25% margin opportunity but filling a job at an unrealistic wage would have created turnover for the client and a poor experience for the employee.
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Why In the World Are We Publishing This?
We could keep the spread vague. The overwhelming majority of firms do. But if you’re deciding whether a staffing placement is worth it, the honest math matters more than a reassuring paragraph.
The margin we actually walk away with is smaller than most candidates assume.
And now you don’t have to take our word for it. You can hold us to these numbers, ask us to explain any line you don’t understand, and use them to judge whether working with us actually makes sense for you. This is a very different pitch than “trust us.”
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We’ll Tell You Your Specific Numbers!
Apply today, and a recruiter will walk you through exactly what your bill rate and pay rate look like for the role you’re considering. You’ll get no vague math, no runaround from us. We’ll provide you with the same honest breakdown you just read, applied to your specific job.