Employer Burden

The one-sentence answer

Employer burden is everything it costs to employ someone beyond their hourly wage — payroll taxes, workers' compensation insurance, and paid sick leave — expressed as a percentage on top of the wage.

What this means for you

Pay someone $20/hour and it does not cost $20/hour. At a 20% burden rate it costs $24. Across a year of regular support hours, that difference is real money — and it is money that buys no additional care.

Burden rates differ a lot between FMS providers. Across the eighteen providers offering Co-Employer, DDS publishes rates from 17.23% to 24.86%. That spread is the single largest cost difference between one FMS and another.

This is the number to ask about, and here is why it matters more than it looks:

Your FMS fee is paid by the regional center outside your budget, so it costs you nothing — see Financial Management Services. Burden is a different animal. It attaches to your workers' wages, inside your spending plan. So when families ask "which FMS is cheapest," the honest answer is that the fee isn't the variable — the burden rate is.

Ask any FMS you're considering for their current burden rate for the model you'll use, in writing. A provider who won't put a number on it is telling you something.

For the detail-oriented

Burden typically comprises the employer share of FICA (Social Security and Medicare), federal and state unemployment insurance, Employment Training Tax, workers' compensation insurance, and California paid sick leave accrual.

Workers' compensation is where most of the spread between providers comes from — rates vary by the insurer, the classification code, and the provider's own claims history. Several providers publish burden rates with workers' comp listed as "TBD," which makes their headline number not directly comparable.

Compare Co-Employer rates only — and only against each other. Across the 18 providers offering it, Co-Employer burden runs 17.23% to 24.86%. That is the comparison worth making: Co-Employer is how the large majority of families are set up, and every Co-Employer total published by DDS includes workers' compensation, so the numbers mean the same thing as each other.

Sole Employer totals are not comparable to those, and this trips people up. Most of them show workers' compensation as "TBD" rather than a figure — in that model the policy is yours. You choose it, or your FMS helps you find one; either way the premium depends on your policy rather than theirs, so the FMS does not quote it. A Sole Employer total therefore leaves out a real cost, and setting it beside a Co-Employer number makes it look several points cheaper than it is. The rate you actually pay will likely differ from what the same FMS publishes for Co-Employer, so ask them what yours would come to rather than reading it off the table. Any published "statewide range" that spans both models is misleading for this reason.

Burden comes out of your budget. The FMS fee does not. If you want to employ someone, your individual budget pays the full cost of employing them — the wage and the burden both. The FMS provider's own fee is separate, and since 1 July 2022 the regional center pays it outside your budget.

That asymmetry is the single most useful thing on this page, and it is the one most families have backwards.

DDS says so directly. In Self-Determination Program: Employer Burden and Other Employment-Related Costs (25 April 2024), issued under Welfare and Institutions Code section 4685.8(p)(2):

"Employer burden costs shall be identified in and paid from the SDP participant's spending plan."

The list of what counts as burden is closed. The same directive says burden costs "are limited to" six things: FICA taxes, FUTA taxes, SUTA taxes, Employment Training Tax, workers' compensation insurance, and paid sick leave. Anything else an FMS adds to your plan is not burden — it may be legitimate, but it belongs on its own line under its own name.

Burden applies under Co-Employer and Sole Employer, not Bill Payer. The directive is explicit that these costs attach "to employing an SDP participant's staff under the co-employer or the sole employer models." Under Bill Payer nobody is employing anyone, so there is no burden.

Other employment costs are separate from burden, and some are optional. An FMS "may be required to offer certain optional benefits such as Affordable Care Act health insurance or the CalSavers Retirement Savings Program." Beyond that, you and your staff "may agree to include other costs" — health insurance, retirement benefits, and overtime incurred while working with you. These are not burden, but the directive requires that "all required and elected staff employment costs must be included in the participant's spending plan." If you agree to it, it goes in the plan.

A provider can only change their burden rate once a year. The directive: FMS providers "shall update their employer burden no more than one time per year, unless as a result of a significant change in policy or law and with approval from the Department." The change routes from the FMS to its vendoring regional center to DDS, and once approved it is posted publicly on the DDS website — which is why you can look up any provider's rate rather than taking their word for it.

A burden increase does not automatically grow your budget. A change in burden "shall not constitute an adjustment to a participant's individual budget" unless your IPP team determines the specific circumstances in WIC 4685.8(m)(1)(A)(i)(I) apply. In practice: if your provider's rate goes up, the same dollars now buy fewer hours, unless the team agrees an adjustment is warranted. The new rate takes effect on "the date that the updated spending plan is authorized to begin," not the date DDS approved it.

Our own rate is published, and it is not the lowest. Sentinel Four publishes this site and sits eleventh of eighteen on Co-Employer at 20.92%. You can see it beside every other provider's, sorted cheapest first, on choosing an FMS — along with a calculator that shows what the difference between any two of them actually comes to in hours of care.