The question turns up as soon as the admin overflows: should you hire someone, or find a tool? It is almost always framed wrong, because both costs are poorly understood. An employee costs more than the payslip shows. Automation costs less than people fear, but only does part of the work. Here are the numbers for both.
What an employee really costs
In Spain, the hourly labour cost stands at €24.88 according to the national statistics institute for the first quarter of 2026. For a full-time administrative role, the annual bill with contributions comes to around €26,000. That figure excludes recruitment, training, and the risk that the person leaves after eight months and the whole thing starts again.
What the tables leave out
Loaded cost is not full cost. Add paid holiday, the time of whoever trains the new person, the sick leave that arrives at the worst moment, and the gap it leaves while cover is found. None of this appears in the initial budget, and all of it appears in the reality of the first year.
What automation costs, alongside
We price the build at 12 % of the annual cost of the task being automated. A task costing you €8,000 a year comes to around €960, plus maintenance of a fifth of that per year. Most of the projects we take on fall between €500 and €4,000. The gap with a hire is not a few percent: it is an order of magnitude.
But they are not the same thing
Comparing the two figures only makes sense if they do the same work, and they never do. A person handles the exceptions, picks up the phone, notices that a file smells wrong. An automation does one thing, always the same way, without tiring and without holidays. The right question is not which to choose, but which share of the work belongs to which.
How to decide with three numbers
Take what you would give that future hire and break it into blocks. For each one, note how many times a day it comes up, how long it takes, and whether it needs judgement or only execution. You will almost always find one half is repetitive and the other is not. Automate the first, and you will often find the second no longer justifies a full post.
Part-time is often the answer
It is the option we recommend most and the one people consider least. A half-time admin post costs half as much and keeps all the human flexibility. It becomes questionable when half of those hours go into tasks a machine would do without error — and that is where measuring beats guessing.
We have built a free diagnostic that prices a task in two minutes: four questions, the result on screen, and it tells you whether automating it is worth it. Run it on the three heaviest blocks before you write a job advert. And if it concludes that none of them is worth automating, then hiring may well be the answer — it will tell you that too.