Opening up a trucking company. Limited experience. What could go wrong?

So the 14% doesn't cover the federal and state? Just trying to figure out how much to pay my driver, so his net is $1,000 considering payroll taxes.

 

Your state and locality matter a lot for this. It varies by the employees income as well. There are calculators out there that will get you a close estimate. I'd expect it to be in the 13-1400 range with self employment tax. Assuming no kids. That's the other thing. His marital status and number of children will have big impacts on his tax burden. Honestly better to just settle on a fair pay number per week and let him figure it out. Figure out what he makes now and pay that + some amount you both think is fair. Trying to hit a net number is something of a pain in the ###.

 

Also you do not want to pay a truck driver a salary. You pay by the mile or you pay a % of what the truck does. You have none of the usual controls over a truck driver you would have over other types of employees. He may be your friend and he won't be lazy on purpose... But if he makes the same money no matter what his sense of urgency will be gone.

EDIT: People don't drive trucks to get an hourly check. They drive a truck so that they can work as hard as they want and get paid for it. Being paid by the unit of work instead of by the hour is actually a positive when you're great at your job. Yeah he needs a certain amount of money a week to live on... That's his responsibility as a man. To make that happen he needs to do a certain amount of work that the both of you agree on in advance. If he does less than that he should make less and if he does more he should make more.

Hourly pay (in hindsight) was one of the worst things to happen to the American worker. Made us less hard working at the same time it was decoupling our productivity from our pay.

 

Ok, because I don't think I can 1099 them, and people here say it's not fair

 

Close but not accurate. It works like this
100 86
X 1000
So 86x=100000
X= 1162.8

 

Rough estimate after tax you should pay them $1500, if you want them to net $1000. If they are smart enough to do the tax deductions, they can net well over $1000. This is for 1099 btw.

 

Ohh, OK gotcha, this is based on my driver running 2000 miles at 50cpm

 

If you are paying them 50cpm, dont worry about what others are saying about 1099. Some greedy mfers are trying to give 40cpm on 1099 which cause a big deficit at the end of the year. But with 50cpm, they should be ok. Also your runs are fixed 2000 miles every week or its just an example?

 

It's an average estimate of what the carrier I plan on leasing onto gave me.