A Conyers 3PL supervisor texted us on a Tuesday afternoon last month: he needed 200 extra hours of labor for a three-week inventory push, and he wanted to know if overtime was cheaper than bringing in temps. The honest answer was no. Overtime for his team at $18 an hour ran about $31 per hour fully loaded. Our bill rate for the same role was $27.50. He'd been choosing overtime for years, not because it penciled out better, but because it felt simpler.
We get this question a lot. The math surprises almost everyone the first time they sit down and work through it.
For a Georgia warehouse worker earning $18 an hour, overtime fully loaded runs $30–$31 per hour once you add employer FICA, workers' compensation on the elevated wages, and the 1.5x FLSA premium. Temp staffing for the same role typically bills at $27–$28 per hour through an agency. Temps are cheaper per hour in most scenarios. Overtime wins only when the demand burst is short enough (roughly 50 cumulative hours per worker or less) that onboarding time offsets the per-hour savings.
What Overtime Actually Costs Per Hour
Most managers know overtime is 1.5x base pay. That's the FLSA floor and it's non-negotiable. What often gets skipped is the employer burden that stacks on top of those elevated wages.
Here's how the math works for a Georgia warehouse worker at $18 per hour base. The figures use the NCCI Class 8810 workers' compensation rate, Georgia SUTA, and the standard employer FICA rate, all consistent across the accounts we staff in Fulton, Gwinnett, Newton, and Rockdale counties:
| Cost Component | Regular Hour | Overtime Hour | |---|---|---| | Gross wage | $18.00 | $27.00 | | Employer FICA (7.65%) | $1.38 | $2.07 | | Workers' comp (NCCI Class 8810, ~6%) | $1.08 | $1.62 | | FUTA + GA SUTA (~3.3% on first $9,500 earned; $0 after wage base) | $0.60 | $0–$0.40* | | Benefits prorated per hour (health, PTO, 401k) | $3.00–$5.00 | $0** | | Fully loaded cost | $24–$26/hr | $30–$32/hr |
*FUTA and Georgia SUTA apply only until the per-employee wage base is reached ($7,000 federal, $9,500 state). For most workers running overtime mid-year, these are already at zero.
**Benefits are a fixed annual cost. The employer pays the same health insurance premium whether a worker logs 40 hours or 50 that week.
The piece that surprises clients most is the FICA calculation. The employer's 7.65% share applies to every dollar of wages, including overtime. When you push 10 workers through 10 hours of overtime at $27, you're paying $2.07 per hour per worker in FICA on top of the wage. On a 100-hour block, that's $207 in additional FICA cost beyond what you'd pay at regular time.
Workers' compensation follows the same structure. Georgia uses NCCI class codes to set base rates, and those rates apply to total payroll including overtime. At roughly 6% for a standard warehouse role, $27 in overtime wages generates $1.62 in workers' comp cost, compared to $1.08 at regular time. That 54-cent difference compounds fast across a full team.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for March 2026 puts benefits at 30.1% of total compensation costs across all private industry. For warehouse workers, that share runs lower, but the key point holds: those benefit costs don't move when you extend hours. Every overtime hour is a pure wage cost with no benefit offset attached to it.
That benefit structure is the reason overtime looks closer to even when managers do the quick mental math. They think: $27 versus $27.74 bill rate, roughly even. But the $27 in OT wages also carries $3.69 in FICA and workers' comp on top, and nothing coming off the benefit line. The fully loaded overtime hour is $31, not $27.
What Temp Staffing Costs in Georgia
A staffing agency's bill rate covers what you see (the worker's hourly wage) plus what you'd otherwise carry yourself: FICA, workers' compensation, state unemployment, ACA healthcare contributions, drug screening, background checks, and a margin that runs 3–5% of the total bill at reputable agencies.
For a Georgia warehouse associate at $18 per hour base, a bill rate of $27–$28 is typical. Our full line-by-line breakdown of Georgia staffing markup rates shows how that number is built: statutory employer costs alone add roughly $3 above the pay rate, with healthcare, screening, and overhead making up most of the rest. The agency's actual profit margin is the smallest item in the column.
What you're not paying when you use a temp worker: your workers' comp experience modifier doesn't move (the agency carries its own policy), you're not running your own payroll processing, you're not holding a headcount seat that affects your ACA threshold calculation, and you're not on the hook for recruiting costs when the worker no-shows.
Another thing worth flagging: the bill rate doesn't move when demand changes. You pay $27.50 whether you need 40 hours or 60. There's no overtime multiplier on a temp worker's bill rate. That flat structure is part of why the cost comparison shifts so clearly once peaks extend past a couple of weeks, because you're comparing a flat rate against an escalating one.
The Break-Even Calculation
For a Georgia warehouse worker at $18 base wage, the comparison looks like this:
- Overtime fully loaded: approximately $31/hr
- Temp staffing bill rate: approximately $27.50/hr
- Per-hour savings from temp versus overtime: approximately $3.50/hr
Temps are cheaper per hour. But they come with onboarding overhead: orientation, a safety walk-through, system access, and a few hours of reduced productivity while a new worker learns your floor. A reasonable estimate for light industrial onboarding is 6–8 hours of paid time at partial output (this is an illustrative estimate, not a fixed figure; your facility's complexity and worker familiarity with the role type affect it significantly).
At 6 hours of onboarding overhead at $27.50 per hour, that's roughly $165 per temp worker placed. At $3.50 per hour savings from temp versus overtime: $165 divided by $3.50 is about 47 hours per worker to break even on the onboarding cost.
That's about a week of extra work before each temp worker "pays for" the onboarding premium compared to running existing staff on overtime. Every hour after that, the temp is the cheaper option.
| Hours of additional labor needed per worker | Lower-cost approach | |---|---| | Under 40 hours (roughly 1 week or less) | Overtime: simpler, cost is close | | 40–80 hours (1–2 weeks) | Close call; depends on worker willingness and fatigue | | 80–160 hours (2–4 weeks) | Temp staffing | | 160+ hours (4+ weeks) | Temp staffing; evaluate converting to direct hire |
The table assumes workers are willing to run the overtime. In practice, sustained overtime generates refusals by week three. Once workers start saying no, the "cheaper" overtime option becomes a coverage gap, and you're scrambling to fill it at exactly the wrong moment.
When Overtime Still Makes Sense
The per-hour math favors temp staffing, but cost per hour isn't the only input worth weighing.
Overtime makes sense when the demand window is genuinely short: 2 or 3 days of extra volume for a holiday rush or a single large shipment. Setting up a temp relationship and onboarding workers in that window consumes more time than the peak itself. Running existing staff on OT is the practical call, not because it's cheaper per hour, but because the alternative won't land in time.
It's also the right option when the work requires knowledge that can't be transferred quickly. CNC setup, specific ERP workflows, customer-facing roles with relationship context. These are real constraints the cost math doesn't account for.
And there's a practical ceiling on temp staffing for very short bursts: most Georgia agencies have a 4-hour minimum per worker per day. If you need 2 hours of extra effort spread across a large team, overtime is the only real option.
Our advice used to be that overtime was reasonable for anything under three weeks. We've moved that number down to two weeks, because of what we've seen in the NCNS data across our accounts.
One Lawrenceville manufacturing client ran five straight weeks of 50-hour schedules across a team of 14, convinced they were coming out ahead versus bringing in temps. By week three, their no-call/no-show rate had doubled, from a normal 3% to 6%. That's two people per day calling out on a 14-person team, which means the overtime they were counting on to cover the demand gap had stopped covering it. They called us in week five.
Our post on reducing no-call/no-show rates in Georgia operations covers the patterns that drive NCNS spikes in more depth. Sustained overtime is one of the cleaner predictors.
A Decision Framework for Peak Demand
The Monday morning version of this decision comes down to two numbers: how many extra labor hours do you need, and over how many weeks.
| Demand profile | Workers needed | Duration | Recommended approach | |---|---|---|---| | Spot coverage | Any | 1–3 days | Overtime (temps won't onboard fast enough) | | Short peak | 1–4 workers | 1–2 weeks | Borderline: overtime is simpler, cost is close | | Short peak | 5+ workers | 1–2 weeks | Temp staffing (volume justifies the pipeline investment) | | Sustained peak | Any | 2–4 weeks | Temp staffing (overtime generates fatigue and NCNS by week two) | | Extended demand | Any | 4+ weeks | Temp staffing; evaluate temp-to-hire or direct hire alongside |
A few inputs worth checking before you make the call. First, what are your workers actually willing to do? If you can get 3 people to volunteer for overtime and 8 won't touch it, the "overtime option" covers 30 hours, not 100. Second, what's your current NCNS trend? Workers with existing attendance patterns tend to get worse under sustained overtime schedules, not better.
Third, and this one matters more than most managers expect: what's your workers' compensation experience modifier? If you've had a cluster of recent claims, your modifier may be elevated above 1.0, which pushes your effective overtime cost well above the base 6% rate in the table. At a 1.3 experience modifier, that same $18/hr worker runs $33 or more per overtime hour, and the break-even point in favor of temp staffing moves much earlier.
To run the comparison for your specific account and demand profile, our staffing ROI calculator lets you plug in your actual rates, current modifier, and labor need to find where the break-even lands.
If you're working through a demand spike right now and trying to figure out whether overtime is holding you up or costing you extra, we can run the actual numbers for your account. We staff warehouse and light industrial operations across Conyers, Lawrenceville, Smyrna, and the rest of the Atlanta MSA, and we can put a cost comparison together in less than a day. Get Started and tell us what the demand looks like.
