A fleet owner with eight trucks works out that he is spending too many evenings on the phone and decides to hire a dispatcher. He looks up what dispatchers earn in his area, picks a number, and budgets that number.
Twelve months later the line item is considerably larger than the number he picked, and the phone still rings in the evening. Both of those outcomes were predictable.
This is not an argument against hiring. Plenty of fleets should have a dispatcher on staff, and an in-house person who knows the drivers by name is genuinely hard to beat. It is an argument for doing the arithmetic on the real figure rather than the salary figure, and for being honest about what one seat covers.
Start with the salary, then keep going
Put your own local salary number in the first line. The components that follow are the ones that get left out.
Employer payroll contributions
In Canada, an employer pays its share of Canada Pension Plan and Employment Insurance contributions on top of the wage, plus provincial payroll obligations such as workers' compensation premiums and, depending on the province and the size of the payroll, an employer health levy. In the United States the equivalent is the employer share of Social Security and Medicare, plus federal and state unemployment tax and workers' compensation.
The combined effect in both countries is commonly in the region of ten to fifteen percent on top of gross wages, varying by province, state and industry classification. Your accountant can give you the exact figure for your situation in five minutes. It is worth asking, because it is the single largest item people forget.
Benefits
If you offer health coverage, dental, or a retirement contribution, add it. If you do not, note that you are competing for candidates against carriers who do, which shows up later as a higher salary requirement or as turnover.
The desk
Workspace, a computer, a second monitor, a headset, a phone line. If the dispatcher works from your yard office, some of this is already sunk. If you are adding a seat, it is not.
Software seats
This is the one that surprises people. A working dispatcher typically needs a load board subscription, a seat on your TMS, an ELD portal login, and access to whatever you use for document capture and communication. Several of these are priced per user. Adding a dispatcher is not only a payroll decision, it is a licence decision, and the incremental software cost per seat is rarely trivial.
Recruiting and training
Job postings, the hours you spend interviewing, and the period after the start date where the new dispatcher is being paid but is not yet productive. Dispatch has a long learning curve because most of the job is judgment about brokers, lanes and receivers that cannot be handed over in a document. Budget for weeks, not days.
Turnover
Dispatch has meaningful churn. It is a stressful desk, the hours are unsociable, and a competent dispatcher is portable. If your dispatcher leaves after eighteen months, you pay the recruiting and training cost again, and you absorb a gap in the middle where nobody is doing the work.
The way to budget for this honestly is to divide your recruiting and ramp-up cost by the number of months you realistically expect someone to stay, and carry that as a monthly line.
A worked example
The numbers below are illustrative only. Substitute your own.
Take a base salary figure and call it S. Add twelve percent for employer contributions. Add a benefits figure if you offer them. Add the annual cost of the software seats that person consumes. Add the desk. Then add one twelfth of your recruiting and ramp cost for every month you expect them to stay less than three years.
For most small fleets that arithmetic lands somewhere between one hundred and twenty and one hundred and forty percent of the headline salary. If you budgeted the salary and nothing else, you are between twenty and forty percent short before the first day.
The part that is not about money
Here is the harder problem. One dispatcher is one shift.
A trucking operation does not run one shift. Drivers break down at two in the morning. Receivers in different time zones set appointments outside your office hours. Brokers on the west coast are still working when an Ontario office has been closed for three hours. Load boards do not go quiet overnight, and the reloads booked at six in the morning are often the ones booked by whoever was awake first.
One full-time dispatcher covers roughly forty hours of a one hundred and sixty-eight hour week. The other one hundred and twenty-eight hours are covered by you, by the driver working it out alone, or by nobody.
That is before vacation, before statutory holidays, before sick days, and before the week the dispatcher is at a family wedding. A single-seat dispatch function has no redundancy at all. When that person is unavailable, the function stops, and the owner picks it up.
Fleet owners usually discover this in month two, and the discovery is what produces the familiar situation of having hired a dispatcher and still answering the phone at ten at night.
What full coverage actually requires
If the goal is that no call goes unanswered and no email sits overnight, the honest staffing requirement is not one person. Covering one hundred and sixty-eight hours with proper handover, holiday cover and a backup for illness takes something closer to three to four seats, depending on how much of the overnight window needs an active person rather than an on-call one.
At North American loaded cost, most eight-truck fleets cannot carry that. So they do the rational thing and accept partial coverage, which means accepting that some things get missed.
The alternative that has become normal in the last few years is to buy the coverage where the loaded cost is a fraction of the North American figure, and keep the judgment calls in-house. A dedicated person working your hours on your systems, with a named backup, costs materially less than a local hire and can cover the windows a single local hire structurally cannot.
How to make the comparison fairly
If you are weighing the two, compare like for like. Put the full loaded cost of the local hire on one side, not the salary. Put the number of covered hours next to each option. Add the value of the redundancy, which is the cost of the function stopping for a week.
And be clear about what you are not outsourcing. Customer relationships, rate decisions above a threshold, driver discipline and anything involving your safety rating should stay with you regardless of how the desk is staffed.
We are obviously not neutral on this. But the arithmetic above works whichever way you decide, and a fleet that has done it properly makes a better decision than one that budgeted a salary and hoped.