Percent of collections, used by the two percentage columns
Meetings, notes, supervision time
Multiplies every figure below
W2 costs only
SUTA wage base
Percent. Your state assigns this, new employers often start near 2.7
Employer payroll taxes are figured at 7.65% for Social Security and Medicare, and FUTA at 6% on the first $7,000 of wages. Contractors carry none of these, which is what makes the two columns differ.
A contractor column that looks cheaper is not permission to use it. Whether a clinician is a W2 employee or a 1099 contractor is decided by how the work is actually controlled, not by which column you prefer. If you set their schedule, require your EHR, assign their caseload, or supervise their clinical work, they are almost certainly an employee, and the savings shown here would be a misclassification liability rather than profit. Run that question before you run this math.
What this is really showing you. The gap between a flat rate and a percentage is not a detail, it is the whole risk structure of the hire. A flat rate per session means the practice keeps the upside when rates rise and eats the loss when a payer pays less. A percentage means the clinician rises and falls with you. Pair that with the W2 and 1099 question and you have four genuinely different businesses, not four versions of the same one.
