What does hiring a full-time controller actually cost?

For many owners and CFOs, hiring a good controller is very enticing. You could finally work your way out of the day-to-day accounting and focus on the higher-leverage work that moves the business forward. That has real benefits for the business and for your life. Even at big public companies, a 2026 study in Management Science found that companies where the CFO handed accounting to a chief accounting officer were about 19% less likely to lose their CFO.

When I was researching this, I struggled to find one article that lays out all the costs of hiring a full-time controller. Somebody who could really take the accounting away from the owner or CFO and own the process. To me, there are two costs to hiring any full-time team member: the hard costs and the time costs.

The hard costs are tied directly to cash. Salary, bonus, employee benefits like health insurance and a 401(k) match, and legally required costs like Social Security, Medicare, and workers’ comp. All of these are fairly grounded and can be calculated.

The time costs are the opposite. They are the hours it takes to find and interview candidates, train and onboard them, and manage them going forward. These are the forgotten costs of adding headcount. More touch bases, more reviews, more ad hoc questions, and more judgment calls that need your sign-off. All of it takes time, and as Benjamin Franklin said, time is money.

To turn time into dollars, I use the simple method of annual salary divided by 2,080 hours, which is a 40-hour work year.

Let’s walk through the hard costs and time costs one at a time. At the end, we’ll put real numbers on what it costs a $20M company to hire a controller.

Hard costs

Salary. Salary bands for controllers are wide, because depending on the size of the company a controller can be doing very different jobs. Indeed puts business controller salaries at $76,000 to $172,000, ZipRecruiter says $55,000 to $176,000, and Levels.fyi says $95,000 to $168,000. The bands are wide because companies of very different sizes can afford controllers at very different prices. For a $50M company, paying an experienced controller a base of $170,000 makes sense. For a $20M company, that’s way out of budget. In general, the higher the price, the more selective you can be. At the lower end you’ll see less direct experience, or senior accountants looking for a title bump.

Bonus. Bonus ranges vary as much as salaries. Most accounting jobs I see set the bonus as a percentage of base. Robert Half says most jobs offer 10% to 25% of base salary. Most accounting roles, especially at companies under $20M, target about 10%.

Employee benefits. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks what private employers actually pay for benefits in its Employer Costs for Employee Compensation report. Their figures are shares of total compensation, so I’ve converted them to a percentage on top of salary. I’ve left out paid leave, because for a salaried employee that’s already inside the salary.

Insurance: about 11%
Retirement: about 5%
Legally required (Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, workers’ comp): about 10%

In total, expect to pay about 26% on top of salary for benefits. Thankfully, most of that doesn’t apply to the bonus. The exception is the legally required piece, which hits the bonus too. The government needs their money.

Time costs

Candidate search. This is the first of the time costs, and where the math gets more abstract. From my experience, it takes 2 to 6 hours to fully define a job, its responsibilities and duties, the pay range, and post it on LinkedIn or wherever you post. You’ll get a pile of applicants, and the vast majority will be badly underqualified. For the sake of argument, let’s say five are qualified. You interview all five for a quick 30 minutes. The ones you like come back for a full hour. Then you talk it over internally and decide who gets the offer.

Writing the job posting: 4 hours
Reviewing applications: 1 hour
First-round interviews: 2.5 hours
Second-round interviews: 3 hours
Internal deliberation: 1 hour

That’s 11.5 hours from job posting to offer. It assumes a lot. It assumes your interview process, like most small businesses, runs on gut feel rather than technical tests. It assumes you’re efficient at posting and interviewing. Adjust up or down based on your own hiring experience.

Onboarding. For accounting roles, especially someone working under an owner or CFO, you find out fast whether you made the right hire. If you hired the wrong controller, I’m confident you’ll know within three months.

But even when you can tell quickly, you don’t get back the time you spent onboarding and training. Indeed says employers spend an average of 33 hours training a new employee. In reality it depends on the hire. Some take almost no training because they want to rebuild the whole accounting system their way. Others take three full months. It depends on the size and complexity of the business they’re joining.

Ongoing management. Harvard Business Review suggests managers plan on about two hours a month of one-on-ones so employees have time to raise practical and personal needs. Controllers are no different. They’ll want 30 minutes a week or an hour every two weeks with you. The cadence doesn’t matter much. Just know you’re adding about 24 hours a year of standing meetings.

And hiring a controller doesn’t mean you never think about accounting again, at least not in the short term. There will be judgment calls the controller wants your input on, and one-off questions that come up. Call it 4 hours a month, or 48 hours a year. That number goes up if you already have a fairly sophisticated accounting setup.

Nobody wants their career to sit still, either. Everyone wants feedback and reviews. Add another hour a month for review-related items.

In total, I’d estimate a conservative 84 hours a year of management time added to your plate. Make sure that’s less than you’re spending on the accounting today.

What it costs a $20M company

Let’s put real numbers on it. Say the owner or CFO of a $20M business is hunting for a controller. They pay themselves $200,000, which works out to about $96 an hour.

Hard costs

Controller salary: $120,000
Bonus at 10%: $12,000
Benefits at about 26% of salary: $31,200
Legally required costs on the bonus, about 10%: $1,200
Total hard costs: about $164,400 a year

Time costs

Candidate search: 11.5 hours × $96 = $1,104
Onboarding: 33 hours × $96 = $3,168
Ongoing management: 84 hours × $96 = $8,064
Total time costs: about $12,300 in year one, dropping to about $8,000 a year after that, when only the ongoing management is left.

The real kicker: according to the Work Institute, over a third of new hires quit within their first year. So all that time and money has roughly a two-in-three chance of paying off.

Is it worth it?

Hiring is hard, expensive, and has about a one-in-three chance of not working out. Yet for many companies, finding the right person to take the accounting off the owner’s plate is what takes the business to the next level.

If you’d rather not run this math alone, book a 15-minute call. Tell us where your books stand, and we’ll tell you plainly whether a full-time hire, an outsourced controller, or neither is the right next step.

What does hiring a full-time controller actually cost?

Hard costs

Time costs

What it costs a $20M company

Is it worth it?

References

Find out what your real number is.