Co-Employer

The one-sentence answer

You choose, direct and supervise your worker; the Financial Management Service shares the legal responsibilities of being their employer with you.

What this means for you

You still pick the person and run the job. Co-Employer does not mean the FMS chooses your worker or tells them what to do. You hire, you set the schedule, you supervise. What the FMS takes on is the paperwork side of being an employer — payroll, tax withholding and filing, workers' compensation, verifying the person is eligible to work.

It is the model most families use. Roughly 85–90% of people in the program are set up this way, and it is the model most FMS providers are best set up to support.

Employer burden applies, and it comes out of your budget. Employing someone costs more than their wage — see employer burden. Across the 18 providers offering Co-Employer, burden runs from 17.23% to 24.86%. At $22 an hour that is the difference between a real cost of about $25.80 and about $27.50.

Compare Co-Employer rates only against other Co-Employer rates. Every Co-Employer total published by DDS includes workers' compensation, so they mean the same thing as each other. Sole Employer totals mostly do not — see the warning on Sole Employer.

Sharing employer status has a practical upside. Because the FMS is a co-employer rather than an agent, more of the employment compliance burden genuinely sits with them rather than with you. For most families that is the point.

For the detail-oriented

The official DDS name for code 316 is FMS – Co-Employer, and unusually for these three, the plain name and the official name are the same.

What the regional center pays — not you. Tiered by the number of employees and providers in your spending plan, with single goods purchases excluded from the count:

Employees / providers in the plan	Monthly rate
0–4	$380
5–10	$600
11+	$840

Where the preferred language is not English: $420, $660 and $925. The regional center pays this outside your individual budget.

One honest limit on the description above. The account of who is legally the employer of record in Co-Employer versus Sole Employer is standard self-direction practice and matches the official code names — but no DDS document has been found that states it in those terms. We describe it because families need a working answer, and we flag it because we would rather you knew which parts are quoted and which are inferred.