Researched and independently checked 28 October 2026. USD, United States. These are planning assumptions for fictional worked examples, not SMF/client payroll, recruitment performance or a representative franchise-sector pay benchmark.
Source and calculation
Payscale: Franchise Development Manager, updated 1 September 2026, reports average base salary $51,097 and total-pay range $42,000–$73,000 from nine profiles. The sample is small and does not establish a senior development-director rate.
BLS: private-industry compensation, June 2026, published 17 September 2026, gives wages $32.82 of $46.89 hourly compensation: wages 70%, benefits 30%. This covers private industry broadly, not franchise recruitment staff specifically.
Using an assumed 2,080 paid hours a year: $51,097 / 2,080 / 0.70 = $35.09/hour, rounded to the approved $35/hour base. For the $50/hour high case: $73,000 / 2,080 / 0.70 = $50.14/hour, rounded to $50. The latter is a scenario using the reported upper total-pay figure, not a statistical upper bound.
Annual paid hours and BLS hours worked are different denominators. Combining cash-pay figures with a broad benefits share is an approximation; total pay can already include variable cash items also represented in compensation loading. Do not treat either scenario as an audited fully loaded payroll rate or cost per productive candidate hour. Replace it with your own compensation, employer-cost and time records when available. Overhead, tools and production are separate inclusions, not automatically covered by this rate.
Allocation policy
House default: rep hours logged to the source/cohort x loaded hourly rate. Apply the same rate and cost scope to all compared sources and state the cutoff. The supplied examples retain their invented hours; only the staff-rate assumption changes.
Labelled fallback when time logs are absent: allocate a known recruitment staff-cost pool using the agreed graded-inquiry counts. State the pool, period, eligible population and counts, show unknown-source records consistently, and reconcile allocated amounts to the whole pool. This does not measure time consumed. Reference article 05 is a worked example of this fallback. Do not turn missing cost records into zero or silently compare a staff-excluded figure with a staff-included one.
Sensitivity: hold the same hours, direct costs and signing counts fixed and rerun at $50/hour. Zero signings remains not calculable; unknown-source staff allocations are not a fully allocated acquisition cost. Dollars per signed are rounded to cents, half up. The worked figures are fictional teaching examples.
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