Fractional Project Manager vs. Full-Time Hire: What It Really Costs
Here's the short answer: if you have about 30 hours a week of real project management work, hire someone full-time. If you have 10 to 40 hours a month, fractional support costs less and starts working immediately.
That's the whole decision. The rest of this post is the math behind it, because "it depends" is a useless answer when you're staring at a number with five digits in it and trying to decide if you can live with it.
What a full-time APM actually costs
The salary is the number everyone quotes, and it's the number that gets you in trouble. National averages for an assistant project manager run somewhere in the high $50,000 to around $110,000, depending on who you’re hiring, how much experience they have, what their sex and race is, and what they’re bringing to the plate.
However, for the point of this exercise, we’re going to use $70,000, which does a good job illustrating the math.
Cost Annual
Base salary $70,000
Payroll taxes (FICA, 7.65%) $5,355
Unemployment insurance $700
Workers' comp $350
Health insurance $9,000
Retirement match (3%) $2,100
End-of-year bonus $3,500
Laptop, phone, software seats $6,000
Total, year one $97,005
Plus the hiring cost itself. A recruiter runs 15 to 25 percent of first-year salary. Doing it yourself is cheaper in dollars and expensive in your time, which is the thing you're short on already.
Plug in your own numbers. Workers' comp and unemployment rates vary by state, and family health coverage can run two to three times the single-coverage figure. But the shape holds: the real cost of a full-time hire lands somewhere between 1.25 and 1.4 times the salary.
Now divide by the hours you actually get
A salaried year looks like 2,080 hours, but won’t get 2,080 hours even if you micromanage the ever-loving shit out of them.
Take out one week of vacation, seven holidays, and a week of sick time, and you're at about 1,944 hours. So $97,005 across 1,944 hours comes out to roughly $50 an hour for a year-one employee.
And that assumes they're productive from day one, which they aren't. Somebody new to your company needs three to six months to learn your jobs, your GCs, your billing formats, and which foreman actually answers his phone. During that stretch, you're the one training them, so the first few months cost you money and time.
When hiring wins
Full-time is genuinely the better deal when you can keep the seat full and productive. At $50 a loaded hour, an employee beats almost any outside help on price per hour.
The catch is that the cost is fixed. You pay the same $97,005 whether you hand them 40 hours of work a week or 12. A half-busy APM costs exactly as much as a busy one.
So when does it make sense to bring in fractional support at $65 an hour instead?
$97,005 ÷ $65 = about 1,492 hours a year. That's 29 hours a week.
If you have over roughly 29 hours a week of steady APM-level work, hire an in-house employee. If you’re below that threshold, you're paying full-time money for part-time output.
Most contractors doing $2 to $8 million a year are running three to ten medium-to-large jobs with smaller jobs filling in the workload. Typically, that isn't 28 hours a week of APM work. That’s closer to 10 to 25 hours a month of stuff that's genuinely needs that level of work: change order documentation, pay app backup, submittal tracking, closeout, and so much more. If that APM also helps with estimating, that can be helpful, but also can create its own problems.
If you have an admin assisting you, she can help with part of this, but there’s a large portion of this work that she has no experience in and simply cannot help you with.
If you have project managers who came up from the field, there are large swaths of this work getting done wrong if at all, getting done late, and making the jobs harder to manage. That's not a character flaw. It's a skill set nobody ever taught him. And having your admin do that work for him causes strife in the office, because she has plenty to do besides wiping his… desk.
When you grow to a point where this divide in work is making an impact, that’s when you need an APM because that person has a mix of admin and field experiences to support the admin team, the PM, and the field.
What fractional actually costs
For comparison, here's our pricing at Rippling Roots for fractional assistant project management:
Package Monthly Price Year
Focused 10 hrs $750/m $9,000
Core 20 hrs $1,300/m $15,600
Extended 40 hrs $2,400/m $28,800
As you can see, even if you’re paying a fractional APM an Extended rate, you’re still saving $67,705 per year for the full-time hire. That's a lot of truck payments or a sizeable budgetary adjustment toward bringing on a new full-time project manager.
There's no payroll tax, no benefits, no workers' comp, no laptop, no recruiting, no end-of-year bonuses, no holiday party invite, and no three-month ramp-up. You also don't carry the risk of a slow quarter, which matters more in this business than anyone likes to admit.
The honest trade-off: you get 20-40 hours a month, not 20 hours a week. Fractional support handles a defined scope well. It does not replace a full-time PM once you have enough work to fill the seat.
The options nobody puts on the list
Part-time employee. A real option, and cheaper per hour than fractional contract help. The problem is finding one. Experienced construction APMs who want 20 hours a week are rare, and the ones who exist usually have a full-time offer in hand. In Alaska and Hawaii, that pool gets very small very fast.
Promote a journeyman. I’ve seen this happen a few times, but rarely. They will not take a pay cut and the learning curve is steep.
A general virtual assistant at $25 an hour. Great for scheduling and inbox cleanup. They do not know what belongs in T&M backup, and they won't notice the change order you did in March and never billed. You'll spend the savings on rework.
Your spouse keeps doing it. This is the most expensive option on the list, and the bill doesn't show up in QuickBooks, but in divorce court. That sounds funny—ba-da dum—but it’s an all-too common reality.
How to decide this week
Track it for two weeks. Every time you or somebody else does project management work (change orders, RFIs, submittals, pay app backup, tracker updates, closeout paperwork), write down the minutes.
Over 125 hours a month? Hire full-time, and start recruiting now because it'll take you three months.
40 to 125 hours a month? Split it. Bring on fractional support for the documentation-heavy work, and revisit in six months when you can see the trend.
Under 40 hours a month? Fractional support, and don't feel bad about it. You're not behind. You just don't have a full seat's worth of work yet.
The worst move is the one most contractors make, which is doing none of it until a pay app gets kicked back the same week payroll is due.
FAQs
How much does a fractional assistant project manager cost? Typically $60 to $80 an hour, usually sold in monthly blocks of hours. Ours start at $750 a month for 10 hours. There are no payroll taxes, benefits, or equipment costs on top. If we need to buy a specific license to do the work, there may be additional costs.
What does a full-time assistant project manager cost a contractor? Around $70,000 in base salary, and roughly $97,000 once you add payroll taxes, health insurance, workers' comp, retirement match, bonus, and equipment. That works out to about $50 an hour against the hours you actually get.
Is fractional cheaper than hiring? Below about 29 hours a week of steady assistant project management work, yes, and by a lot. Above that, a full-time employee costs less per hour, assuming you can keep them busy and can find one.
What can a fractional assistant project manager handle remotely? Change order documentation, RFI and submittal logs, pay application preparation and billing backup, project trackers, procurement follow-up, closeout packages, as-built updates, submittal building and review, and plenty more. Field supervision and customer relationships stay with you.
How long does it take to get started? Days, not months. Most engagements start with a Backlog Rescue that clears whatever's stuck right now, which also tells us both how much ongoing support you actually need. The hardest part is literally giving remote access.
Frankie Allen spent 30 years in construction, from drafter to journeyman electrician to project manager on residential, commercial, hospital, and federal jobs. Rippling Roots provides fractional project management support to contractors in Alaska, Hawaii, and the Western U.S. Other areas can apply. We are, however, located in Alaska which has its own time zone.
