Sole Employer

The one-sentence answer

You are the employer. The Financial Management Service acts as your agent — running payroll and filing your employment taxes on your behalf — but the legal responsibility sits with you.

What this means for you

More control, more responsibility. Sole Employer gives you the most direct authority over your workers. It also means the obligations of being an employer rest with you rather than being shared.

The published rate almost certainly understates what it costs you. This is the most important thing on this page. On the DDS burden table, most Sole Employer entries show workers' compensation as "TBD" rather than a number — because in this 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. Expect the rate you actually pay to differ from the figure the same FMS publishes for Co-Employer.

So a Sole Employer total of, say, 14.87% is not comparable to a Co-Employer total of 20.92%. The first one is missing a cost that the second one includes. Workers' compensation across providers who do publish it runs from roughly 1.6% to 9.2% — so the real gap between the models is much smaller than the headline numbers suggest, and can run the other way.

Ask two questions before choosing this model. What will workers' compensation actually cost me, and who arranges it? A provider who cannot answer both in writing is not the right provider for Sole Employer.

Not every FMS offers it. Several offer Sole Employer to existing clients but not to new ones. Ask directly rather than assuming from a list.

For the detail-oriented

The official DDS name for code 317 is FMS – Fiscal/Employer Agent. "Sole Employer" is the plain name used in the DDS FAQ and contact list. The federal analogue is an IRS §3504 fiscal/employer agent — an entity authorized to handle payroll and employment tax filing on an employer's behalf without becoming the employer.

What the regional center pays — not you — is the same schedule as Co-Employer:

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. Paid by the regional center outside your individual budget.

Same honest limit as on Co-Employer. The description of who is legally the employer of record is standard self-direction practice and consistent with the official code names, but no DDS document has been found stating it in those terms.