I've worked in finance for a medium-sized SF company and a small (~50 employee) startup in SV. Our standard assumption for 'all-in' employee cost was to add an additional 30% on top. For highly paid employees, this actually gets reduced a bit since FICA cuts off at $118k.

To get to $250k total outlay with an admittedly outdated spreadsheet, the salary would have to be $200k (benefit load of only 26%). Of course this depends greatly on PTO, Health Care, Worker's Comp, etc.

There isn't as much as people bitch about, generally speaking you have a few items:

- FICA payroll tax - this is US wide, so not really more expensive in CA. - CA state payroll tax, this isn't that expensive, just a few percent. - Workers comp, could be cheaper in other states, but coders/office workers have cheap workers comp. - Health insurance, maybe a bit more expensive in CA

Basically hiring people isn't expensive because of the taxes, but because of benefits and just generally having a higher income rate. In my experience it was about 10%, and if you add health care another 10-15% so about 25% total overhead.

Also office space: 100 - 200 sq.ft. per employee * $75/sq.ft. in SF -> $7k5 - $15k per employee.

That's like for the MOST expensive office space in SF though. Also that's PER YEAR, not per month.

I once rented out office space in SOMA, and it was more like $18 sqft/year. It was cheap and in a shitty place, but still SOMA.

That's average price according to http://fortune.com/2016/01/11/san-francisco-office-rent/

It depends a lot on corporate structure and actually HQ address for tax filling. Each city has their own business license rates and deductions. And some cities (like SF) have extra taxes per employee. Their website lists their HQ as SF, but it would be impossible to know from the outside what their exact tax situation would be.

I guess my point is though from a company perspective not much more than anywhere else. The biggest cost to a company here is competing on wages.