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Temp Staffing

The companies that define the temp staffing industry, each read on the same nine-check website rubric — a 0–100 score with the exact fixes — alongside the concepts, the developments and the questions that shape the field.

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The companies

35 companies in the temp staffing industry, each graded on the nine things that decide whether a buyer or an AI assistant can find and trust them online. Open any name for the full write-up and the specific fixes.

70+ solid   45–69 gaps   under 45 costing customers

Sites we couldn’t reach

3 businesses whose website blocked our scanner — common when a site filters datacenter traffic, and not a sign the site is broken. A blocked site is never scored zero.

Who defines the temp staffing market

The firms, funds and institutions that set the terms in temp staffing — context, not local listings; never scored.

Temp Staffing guides

Concepts

W-2 vs 1099 vs corp-to-corp

The three ways a worker gets paid on an assignment. W-2: the staffing firm is the employer, withholds taxes and carries workers' comp and unemployment. 1099: the worker is an independent contractor and carries all of it. Corp-to-corp: the agency contracts with the worker's own entity. Only the facts of the relationship decide which is lawful — a signed agreement calling someone a contractor does not make them one.

Right to control (IRS common-law test)

The IRS common-law test asks who has the right to direct and control the work, weighing behavioral control (instructions, training), financial control (investment, unreimbursed expenses, opportunity for profit or loss, availability to the market) and the type of relationship (contracts, benefits, permanency, whether the work is a key business activity). The right to control matters even when it is never exercised.

DOL independent contractor rule (FLSA economic reality)

The Wage and Hour Division's regulation for when a worker is an employee under the Fair Labor Standards Act, applying a multi-factor economic-reality analysis. The standard has swung between administrations — a 2021 rule, a 2024 replacement, and a February 2026 proposal to rescind the 2024 analysis and return to the 2021 approach — so the safe operating posture is to document the underlying facts, which no rule change alters.

Texas Workforce Commission employment status

For Texas unemployment tax and wage-claim purposes, TWC applies its own common-law and 20-factor direction-and-control analysis, independent of the IRS and DOL. A worker can be a contractor for one agency's purposes and an employee for another's. TWC status determinations are what drive an agency's state unemployment tax account and its exposure on wage claims.

Joint employer and the NLRB standard

Two entities are joint employers when both control essential terms and conditions of employment — wages, hours, scheduling, supervision, discipline, hiring and firing. The NLRB's 2023 expansion (which would have counted reserved and indirect control) was vacated by a federal court in March 2024 and formally withdrawn in February 2026, leaving the narrower 2020 standard requiring substantial direct and immediate control.

Co-employment risk

In staffing, co-employment is normal, not a defect — the agency and the client each hold part of the employer role. Risk arises when the client's conduct blurs the line: putting temps in the client's HR system, running the client's discipline process, promising raises, or treating temps as indistinguishable from employees for benefits eligibility. Contract language and consistent practice are the controls.

PEO vs ASO vs staffing agency

A staffing agency recruits and supplies workers it employs. A professional employer organization co-employs a client's own existing workforce under a client service agreement, handling payroll, benefits and comp. An administrative services organization does the same administrative work without co-employment — the client remains the sole employer of record.

Certified PEO (CPEO)

An IRS designation under which a PEO is solely liable for federal employment taxes on wages it pays, so the client is not exposed if the PEO fails to remit. Certification requires bonding, independent financial review and ongoing reporting. It is the main structural distinction a buyer should ask about when comparing PEOs.

Payrolling and employer of record

The client has already found the worker and asks the agency only to employ and pay them. The agency is the employer of record — it runs payroll, withholds, insures and carries the comp and unemployment exposure — with no recruiting. Priced at a lower markup than recruited placements because the sourcing cost is zero, but the liability is identical.

Workers' compensation class codes and the experience modifier

Every job is assigned a classification code carrying its own rate per $100 of payroll; a clerical code and a roofing code differ by an order of magnitude. The experience modification rate then multiplies that premium up or down based on the firm's own claims history versus its class average. Both belong in the bill rate — an agency that quotes a single markup across all class codes is losing money on the dangerous ones.

Texas non-subscriber status

Texas is the state where private employers may decline to carry workers' compensation insurance. Non-subscribers give up the exclusive-remedy protection and can be sued directly for negligence, without the usual common-law defenses. For a staffing firm this is a live decision, and clients routinely require subscriber status and a certificate of insurance before the first shift.

OSHA multi-employer worksite doctrine and the host/agency shared duty

OSHA can cite more than one employer on a site — the one that created the hazard, the one that controls the site, the one whose employees are exposed, and the one able to correct it. Under OSHA's temporary worker guidance the host employer and the staffing agency share the duty for a temp's safety: the host generally provides site-specific hazard training and controls the conditions, the agency provides general awareness training and must not place a worker into a hazard it knows about.

Temporary worker safety training

The practical division of labor: the agency trains on general workplace safety, right-to-know, injury reporting and the right to refuse unsafe work; the host trains on the actual machines, chemicals, lockout/tagout, PPE and emergency procedures at that site. The agency should walk the site before placing anyone and document what it saw, because 'we didn't know' is not a defense.

I-9 and E-Verify

As the employer of record the staffing firm — not the client — completes Form I-9 and retains it, verifying identity and work authorization within the statutory deadlines. E-Verify is the federal electronic check against government records; it is voluntary federally but mandatory for Texas state agencies and for many federal contractors, and increasingly required by client contract.

Ban-the-box and fair-chance hiring

Laws and ordinances that bar asking about criminal history on an initial application or before a conditional offer, and that require individualized assessment of the offense's relationship to the job. Coverage varies by state and city and by public versus private employer, so a multi-state agency's application must be built to the strictest jurisdiction it recruits in.

Background check and FCRA adverse action

A background check run through a consumer reporting agency is a consumer report under the Fair Credit Reporting Act. That triggers a standalone written disclosure, separate authorization, and — if the report will cost the applicant the job — a pre-adverse action notice with a copy of the report and the summary of rights, a reasonable waiting period to dispute, and then a final adverse action notice. Skipping the two-step sequence is one of the most commonly litigated errors in staffing.

Drug testing policy

What is tested, when (pre-placement, random, reasonable suspicion, post-accident), by what method, and under whose policy — the agency's or the client's. Complications include DOT-regulated roles with their own mandatory program, state marijuana laws that conflict with client requirements, and post-accident testing practices that can chill injury reporting.

Wage and hour, overtime and the FLSA exemption tests

Non-exempt workers must receive overtime at one and a half times the regular rate above 40 hours in a workweek. Exemption requires meeting both a salary basis and threshold and a duties test (executive, administrative, professional, outside sales, computer). The regular rate is not the base rate — it must absorb shift differentials, non-discretionary bonuses and multiple pay rates in the same week.

Rest and meal breaks

Federal law does not require meal or rest breaks, but if a short break of roughly 20 minutes or less is given it must be paid, and a bona fide unpaid meal period must be genuinely duty-free. Several states impose their own break mandates; Texas does not, so on Texas assignments the client's own policy controls and the agency's timekeeping must match how breaks are actually taken.

Paid sick leave ordinances and Texas preemption

Austin, San Antonio and Dallas each passed municipal paid-sick-leave ordinances that were blocked in court, and Texas subsequently enacted broad state preemption of local employment mandates. The practical result is that a Texas staffing firm has no statewide or citywide sick-leave obligation — but multi-state agencies and clients with national policies frequently apply one anyway by contract.

Pay transparency

A growing set of state and city laws requiring a good-faith pay range in job postings, and in some places disclosure on request or a bar on asking salary history. It reaches staffing firms directly, since the posting is usually the agency's. Texas has no statewide requirement, but a national job board posting can still trigger another state's rule.

EEO-1 reporting

The annual EEOC filing of workforce demographics by job category, race/ethnicity and sex, required of private employers with 100 or more employees and of covered federal contractors. Staffing firms count their temporary workers, which pushes many agencies over the threshold far earlier than their internal headcount would suggest.

Bill rate and pay rate

The pay rate is what the worker earns per hour. The bill rate is what the client is invoiced per hour. Everything the agency must cover — employment taxes, workers' compensation, unemployment, benefits, recruiting, branch overhead and profit — lives in the difference between the two.

Markup and gross margin

Markup is expressed against pay rate (bill rate divided by pay rate, minus one). Gross margin is expressed against bill rate (gross profit divided by bill rate). They describe the same dollar spread from opposite ends and are routinely confused in negotiation, always in the buyer's favor. Quote and compare in one convention and state which one.

Spread

The raw dollar difference between bill rate and pay rate for an hour worked, before burden is subtracted. Useful as a quick desk-level check, misleading as a profitability measure, because two orders with identical spread can have very different burden depending on class code, overtime and benefit eligibility.

Burden

The employer-side cost of employing the worker beyond wages: the employer share of FICA, federal unemployment tax (FUTA) and state unemployment tax (SUTA), workers' compensation premium at the applicable class code, any benefits or ACA coverage, and paid time off where offered. Burden varies by state, by class code and by the agency's own unemployment experience rate.

Fully-burdened cost

Pay rate plus all burden — the true hourly cost of the worker to the agency before any overhead or profit. The number a bill rate must clear. Agencies that price off pay rate alone discover the gap only when the workers' comp audit or the unemployment rate notice arrives.

Conversion fee and fee schedule

What the client owes to hire a temporary worker onto its own payroll. Usually either a flat fee, a percentage of the worker's first-year salary, or a declining schedule under which the fee drops with each month or each hundred hours the worker stays on assignment and reaches zero after a set period. The schedule is the single most negotiated clause in a temp-to-hire agreement.

Direct hire fee

A one-time placement fee for a permanent hire the agency recruits but never employs, typically a percentage of first-year compensation, billed on start date. No burden, no payroll and no ongoing revenue — the opposite cash profile from a temporary assignment, which is why some agencies treat it as a separate desk.

Buyout

A negotiated payment that ends the conversion obligation early, letting the client hire a worker before the fee schedule has run down. Also used for the reverse problem — a client that quietly hired a worker off assignment and now settles rather than litigate the contract.

Guarantee period

The window after a direct-hire placement or a conversion during which the agency will replace the worker at no charge, or refund on a sliding scale, if the placement fails. Typically 30 to 90 days. The fine print matters: whether a replacement or a refund, whether it survives a layoff, and whether the client must have paid the invoice on time to invoke it.

MSP and VMS

A managed service provider runs a client's entire contingent workforce program — supplier selection, rate governance, compliance and consolidated invoicing. A vendor management system is the software that distributes requisitions to approved suppliers, tracks submittals and captures time. Together they turn a relationship sale into a competitive rate-card process.

Supplier tier

The position an agency holds in a managed program. Tier-one suppliers see requisitions first and hold a release window; lower tiers see the same order minutes or hours later, when the good candidates are already submitted. Tier placement, not recruiting skill, often determines fill share inside a VMS.

VMS fee

The percentage the VMS or MSP takes, usually deducted from the supplier's bill rate rather than added to the client's cost. It comes straight out of gross margin, so a rate card that looks acceptable at first glance can be unworkable once the program fee, payment terms and any early-payment discount are applied.

Statement of work vs staff augmentation

Staff augmentation supplies hours: the client directs the work and pays per hour. A statement of work buys a defined deliverable at a fixed price or milestone schedule, with the supplier directing its own workers. The distinction changes who supervises, who bears performance risk, and how the engagement is classified — which is exactly why some clients relabel augmentation as SOW to route around a contingent-labor policy.

Fill rate

The share of received job orders the agency actually fills, and the honest measure of whether a desk is serving its clients. Read alongside how many orders were declined up front, since a branch can protect its fill rate simply by refusing hard orders.

Time to fill and order-to-fill lead time

Time to fill measures the interval from a job order being received to a worker accepting. Order-to-fill lead time is the operational version of the same question from the client's side — how much notice the agency needs to cover a shift. In light industrial these are measured in hours; in clerical and professional placement, in days or weeks.

Submittal-to-interview ratio

How many candidates the agency submits per interview granted. A poor ratio means the desk is not reading the order correctly, or is spraying candidates to look busy. Tracked alongside interview-to-offer and offer-to-start to locate exactly where a requisition is stalling.

Redeployment rate

The share of workers finishing an assignment who are placed onto a new one rather than lost. The cheapest recruiting an agency can do, since the worker is already onboarded, screened and known. A branch with a low redeployment rate is paying to re-recruit the same labor pool over and over.

Assignment length

How long a worker stays on one assignment. Some clients impose tenure limits — a hard cap after which a temp must be converted or rolled off — originally adopted to limit benefits-eligibility and co-employment exposure. Average length varies sharply by segment, with clerical and professional assignments running far longer than light-industrial ones.

Turnover and attrition

The rate at which assigned workers leave, split into first-day fall-off, week-one, and post-week-four attrition because the causes and the fixes are entirely different. Early attrition usually points to a mismatch between what the recruiter described and what the site actually is.

No-show rate

The share of confirmed workers who do not appear for a shift. The defining operational metric of light-industrial staffing and the reason branches over-recruit, confirm the night before and keep a standby list. Common drivers are transportation, shift timing, pay frequency and a competing same-day offer from an app.

Headcount vs hours billed

Headcount counts bodies on assignment; hours billed counts revenue. They diverge whenever hours per worker shift — overtime cuts, a client moving from ten-hour to eight-hour shifts, or a seasonal ramp of part-week workers. Revenue forecasts built on headcount alone miss the turn.

DSO and payroll funding

Days sales outstanding measures how long a client takes to pay. Because payroll is weekly and terms are commonly net 30 to net 60, a growing agency finances the gap out of its own working capital. Payroll funding is a facility that advances against approved invoices specifically to cover it.

Invoice factoring

Selling accounts receivable to a third party at a discount for immediate cash, sometimes bundled with credit checking and collections. Recourse factoring leaves the agency liable if the client never pays; non-recourse shifts that risk for a higher fee. Expensive money, and often the only money available to a young agency growing faster than it collects.

Credit risk on client receivables

The agency pays its workers whether or not the client pays the invoice, so every account is an unsecured extension of credit. Controls include credit checks before the first order, credit limits per account, watching concentration (one client that is a large share of revenue), stopping service on aged balances, and reading a client's own payment behaviour as an early distress signal.

What’s happening

• US staffing demand has come well off the 2022 peak and is now growing slowly rather than falling. The American Staffing Association's Staffing Index, its weekly read on temporary and contract employment against a June 2006 baseline of 100, read 88 in late May 2026 -- ASA headlined it flat, though it was down 0.2% week over week and up 4.8% year over year -- then improved in June and reached 90 in late July, up 3.7% year over year with a four-week average running about 5% above the same period in 2025. ASA's own chief economist frames it as slow but steady growth with cost pressures and economic uncertainty stifling further gains. Agencies planning against 2021-2022 order volumes are still planning against a market that no longer exists. 2026-08 source ↗
• The scale of the industry is larger than most buyers assume and is the right baseline for any market claim. ASA reports that nearly 2.2 million temporary and contract employees worked for US staffing companies during an average week in 2024, and that staffing companies hired 12.7 million temporary and contract employees over the course of 2023. Roughly 73% of staffing employees work full-time hours, against 75% of the overall workforce. Note the vintages: as of mid-2026 ASA has not published a 2025 average-week or annual-hires figure, so these are the current official numbers and they are one to two years old. 2026-08 source ↗
• The federal independent-contractor standard is being reversed again, and it is not settled. On February 27, 2026 the Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division published a proposed rule to rescind the analysis in 29 CFR part 795 -- the January 2024 rule -- and replace it with the analysis adopted in the January 7, 2021 final rule, with modifications, extending the approach to the FMLA and MSPA. Comments closed April 28, 2026 and no final rule has issued as of August 2026, which means the 2024 rule is still the rule on the books. A separate companion proposal on joint employer status under the FLSA, FMLA and MSPA published April 23, 2026 and is easy to confuse with the NLRB action. For staffing operators the lesson is that the test keeps moving while the underlying facts of control do not: document the facts. 2026-08 source ↗
• The labor-law joint-employer question has settled back to the narrower standard, and the 2026 action was housekeeping rather than a change in law. The NLRB's 2023 rule -- which would have made reserved and indirect control enough to create joint employment -- was vacated by the Eastern District of Texas on March 8, 2024 in Chamber of Commerce v. NLRB, and had been legally inoperative ever since. On February 27, 2026 the Board issued a final rule formally removing the vacated text from the CFR, confirming that the 2020 standard governs: joint-employer status requires substantial direct and immediate control over one or more essential terms or conditions of employment -- wages, benefits, hours, hiring, discharge, discipline, supervision and direction. That reduces, but does not remove, the exposure a staffing client takes on by supervising temporary workers as if they were its own. 2026-08 source ↗
• App-based on-demand labor marketplaces are taking real light-industrial and hospitality share from traditional branches. Instawork states on its own site that it has more than 7 million workers across 400-plus cities in the US and Canada, that 90% of jobs are filled within 24 hours, and that buyers pay an all-inclusive hourly rate covering the worker's pay, insurance and background checks with no subscription -- explicitly positioning against the multi-day agency cycle. Those are self-reported marketing figures rather than audited ones and should be attributed as such. Traba, Wonolo and Shiftsmart attack the same warehouse, production, event and hospitality shift-fill orders. 2026-08 source ↗
• Traditional staffing has responded by buying or building the platform rather than fighting it. Employbridge describes itself as the nation's largest light industrial staffing provider, with more than 220 locations nationwide and 225,000-plus people placed annually across more than 11,000 clients, and it now operates the Bluecrew app-based platform alongside branch brands including ProLogistix in logistics, ProDrivers, Remedy Staffing and Westaff -- the same firm selling both the branch model and the marketplace model to the same distribution centers. 2026-08 source ↗
• AI screening has moved from novelty to audited compliance surface, though the federal layer thinned in 2025. Automated resume ranking, chat-based prescreening and video-interview scoring now sit inside mainstream applicant tracking systems, while New York City's Local Law 144 bias-audit and candidate-notice requirements have been enforceable since July 5, 2023, and Illinois Public Act 103-0804, amending the Human Rights Act effective January 1, 2026, bars AI that produces discrimination or uses zip code as a proxy for a protected class and requires notice when AI is used in covered employment decisions. The EEOC's Title VII and ADA technical assistance documents on algorithmic selection were removed from its website in January 2025 and no longer exist as guidance -- what still governs federally is Title VII itself and the Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures at 29 CFR part 1607, including the four-fifths rule. A vendor's model is not a defense; the employer of record owns the outcome. 2026-08 source ↗
• Candidate identity fraud has become an operational risk rather than an anecdote. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center has warned that North Korean IT workers exploit fraudulent remote-job schemes to infiltrate US companies, obfuscating identity by leveraging US-based individuals, creating fake applications on legitimate hiring platforms, impersonating applicants during interviews, and using US-based intermediaries and laptop farms to receive company equipment. Agencies report the same pattern in ordinary hiring -- proxy interviewers, recycled or fabricated work histories, and increasingly AI-assisted video -- and are reinstating live identity verification, document checks at onboarding and, in some cases, in-person first days. 2026-08 source ↗
• Demand has rotated by skill segment rather than disappearing. ASA's breakdown of staffing employment shows industrial at roughly 36%, office-clerical and administrative at roughly 24%, professional-managerial at roughly 21%, engineering, IT and scientific at roughly 11% and health care at roughly 8% -- with ASA noting that about 40% of staffing employees work in higher-skilled occupations. Healthcare support and skilled trades have held up markedly better than general clerical work, which is the segment most exposed to both remote work and automation of routine administrative tasks. 2026-08 source ↗
• Wage inflation compresses markup from the bottom, but the burden mechanics are less uniform than the shorthand suggests and are worth stating correctly. When pay rates rise faster than clients accept bill-rate increases, the spread narrows in percentage terms even as it grows in dollars. Burden does not simply scale with payroll: FICA is a flat federal percentage of wages -- 6.2% employer Social Security up to the annual wage base plus 1.45% Medicare with no cap -- and workers' compensation is rated per $100 of payroll by class code, but FUTA applies only to the first $7,000 of each employee's wages and state unemployment tax is experience-rated against a state-specific wage base, so those components actually shrink as a percentage as wages rise. Agencies that negotiated flat markups instead of rate-card escalators absorbed the difference; the analysis of who absorbs what is the KB's, not a published finding. 2026-08 source ↗
• Direct sourcing and internal talent clouds are displacing agency share at large employers. Program providers now sell exactly this: private, branded talent pools built around the client's own employer brand to drive faster fills and repeat redeployment, explicitly designed to be combined with an employer-of-record service so the client can employ the people it sourced itself. That captures the recruiting margin and leaves the agency the low-markup payrolling work. The direction is clear from what the vendors sell; the size of the share shift is not published, so treat the displacement claim as directional rather than measured. 2026-08 source ↗
• The MSP and VMS layer continues to consolidate, and the naming tells the story -- major platforms now carry absorbed companies under the parent brand within a single multi-product portfolio for the external workforce. As programs merge under fewer providers, more requisitions arrive through a rate card and a supplier tier rather than a relationship, program fees come out of the supplier's bill rate, and a mid-size agency's ability to hold margin depends on holding tier position. That last consequence is analysis rather than a published finding, since no platform publishes it. 2026-08 source ↗
• Worksite immigration enforcement and I-9 scrutiny have tightened, and the staffing firm -- as employer of record -- holds the exposure. The Texas mandate is narrower than it is often described: Government Code Chapter 673, added by SB 374 in 2015, requires state agencies to register and participate in E-Verify, and it does not reach private employers generally. The broader federal hook is FAR Subpart 22.18 and clause 52.222-54, which require E-Verify enrollment on contracts over $150,000 with a performance period of 120 days or more, with flow-down to covered subcontracts -- and client contracts increasingly require it regardless. Light-industrial staffing, which onboards large numbers of workers quickly at branch level, is where documentation practice is weakest and audit risk highest. 2026-08 source ↗
• Austin's labor market has normalized after the pandemic-era in-migration wave that made it one of the fastest-growing US metros. Hiring urgency has cooled from the period when any warehouse or clerical opening drew a bidding war, while the underlying demand base has broadened into semiconductor and advanced manufacturing, distribution along the I-35 corridor, healthcare and infrastructure trades. Consolidation has followed locally too: Meador Staffing Services, a long-established Texas firm, has joined Openwork, which lists its headquarters on North Hills Drive in Austin. The normalization claim is a characterization rather than a cited statistic -- pull current BLS metro data before putting a number on it. 2026-08 source ↗

Questions people ask

What is the difference between a staffing agency, a PEO and an EOR?

a staffing agency recruits and employs workers it places on your site, a PEO co-employs your existing workforce for HR and payroll, an EOR employs someone you found and directs -- the difference is who recruits and who directs

Who is the legal employer of a temporary worker?

the staffing firm is the employer of record for payroll, tax and workers' compensation, while the client directs the work -- and say plainly that some statutes reach the client anyway, which is what co-employment risk means

What is co-employment and is it something to be afraid of?

describe co-employment as the normal, expected condition of using contingent labor rather than a failure mode, and say the goal is to manage it -- discrimination, harassment, safety and wage-hour duties can attach to the client regardless of who signs the paycheck

What is the difference between bill rate, pay rate and markup?

pay rate is the worker's wage, burden is the employer's payroll tax, workers' compensation and benefits, markup covers recruiting, overhead and profit, and bill rate is the total -- markup percentages are not comparable across firms unless burden is defined the same way

What is burden and what goes into it?

list the components -- employer FICA, federal and state unemployment tax, workers' compensation premium, and any benefits or paid leave -- and say the actual percentage depends on the state, the class code and the experience modifier, so ask the firm to show its build

What is a conversion fee and how does it work?

explain that a conversion or buyout fee compensates the agency when a client hires a temporary worker directly, usually on a declining schedule tied to hours worked -- the amount and schedule are negotiated, so read the agreement rather than assume a standard

What is a temp-to-hire arrangement?

describe it as a trial period on the agency's payroll with a defined conversion point, and note the two things people forget: who pays for the trial hours and what happens if the client hires early

What is the difference between staff augmentation and a statement of work?

staff augmentation bills hours for people the client directs; an SOW buys a defined deliverable the vendor manages -- and warn that a badly written SOW that really is hourly supervision is treated as staff augmentation by auditors

What is an MSP and a VMS?

a managed service provider runs the contingent labor program, a vendor management system is the software; explain that the program fee usually comes out of the supplier's bill rate rather than the client's budget

What is the IRS common-law test for employee versus contractor?

describe the behavioral, financial and relationship factors and say the core question is the right to control; then be clear that no single factor decides and the determination is fact-specific -- classification calls need counsel

What is a joint employer and how is it different from co-employment?

explain that joint employment is a legal finding under a specific statute, while co-employment is the practical condition; note the labor-law standard has swung between reserved-and-indirect control and substantial direct control, so cite the current standard rather than a remembered one

What is Texas non-subscriber status for workers' compensation?

explain that Texas is unusual in not requiring most private employers to carry workers' compensation, and that non-subscribers lose the exclusive-remedy defense -- which is why staffing contracts and client agreements treat coverage as a negotiated point; confirm current law before advising

What markup should I expect to pay for light industrial or clerical staffing?

explain the markup build and the drivers -- pay rate, workers' compensation class code, overtime expectation, volume and payment terms -- and refuse a percentage, because a markup quoted without a defined burden means nothing

Why do two agencies quote very different markups for the same job?

say the pay rate behind the markup is usually different, and so is what is inside burden -- comparable quotes require the same pay rate, the same class code and the same overtime assumption, so ask for a bill rate build, not a markup

Is a lower markup actually cheaper?

say not necessarily: a low markup on a low pay rate produces turnover, no-shows and re-training, and the cost shows up in your production numbers rather than the invoice -- compare cost per productive hour, not markup

How do I calculate the fully burdened cost of a temporary worker versus a direct hire?

give the method -- direct hire wage plus employer taxes, benefits, paid time off, recruiting cost amortized, and the risk-adjusted cost of a bad hire, against the agency bill rate with no benefit or unemployment exposure -- and say the comparison turns on the reader's own benefit load

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