Do It Yourself or Pay Someone: the Hourly Rate Above Which Delegating Pays

The rule everyone uses, and why it is not a rule

The received rule is a comparison of two prices: if you are worth 90 an hour and a cleaner costs 30, delegate. It sounds like arithmetic and it is not, because the two numbers are not the same kind of thing. The 90 is turnover you have not yet paid tax or contributions on, and it is only realised if the hour you free up is actually sold. The 30 is money already taxed, leaving your account today, and it is certain. Comparing a conditional pre-tax number with a certain post-tax one is the whole mistake, and it always errs in the same direction — towards delegating too readily.

Written out properly, the threshold has three factors in the denominator and each of them makes the bar higher, never lower. Call the price of the help C, the hourly turnover your time can generate V, the fraction of freed time you actually convert into paid work p, the share of the hour you still spend briefing and checking t, and your marginal rate of tax and contributions m. For a household task, delegate when V is at least C divided by p, by one minus m, and by one minus t. For a business task, the same expression without the one minus m. Everything interesting in this decision is in those three factors, and the received rule sets all three to their most flattering value.

The factor nobody counts: does the freed hour convert?

The received rule assumes that an hour you do not spend cleaning is an hour you spend earning. Almost never true. Freed hours land in the evening, on a Saturday, in the middle of a week when you already have as much work as you can sell — and they are consumed by rest, family or the internet, all of which are fine uses of an hour but none of which produce turnover. The honest way to handle this is to put a number on it and let it hurt: if you convert half your freed hours into billable work you are doing well, and if you are salaried on fixed hours you convert none of them.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. Help at 30 an hour, ten per cent of the hour spent supervising and a 50 % marginal rate: if you convert every freed hour, the household threshold is 67 an hour of turnover. Convert three quarters and it is 89. Convert half and it is 133. Convert a quarter and it is 267. The number quadruples across a range of behaviour that most people would describe as roughly the same. That is why two people with identical incomes can both be right about opposite decisions, and why arguing about it in the abstract goes nowhere.

The asymmetry: pre-tax money buys twice as much help

Here is the part worth carrying away. A household service is bought with money that has already been taxed, so to spend 30 you first have to earn 30 divided by one minus your marginal rate. A deductible business expense is bought with money that has not been taxed yet: spending 30 reduces your taxable profit by 30 and therefore costs you 30 times one minus your marginal rate. Set the two thresholds side by side and the marginal rate cancels out of the business one, leaving the household threshold exactly 1/(1 − m) times higher — 1.43 times at a 30 % rate, 1.67 at 40 %, 2.00 at 50 %, 2.50 at 60 %.

The practical consequence is one people reliably get backwards. Being highly taxed does not make delegating easier at home — it makes it harder, because every euro of help now costs you two euros of turnover. It makes delegating easier at work, because the deduction is worth more. The people most likely to say they are too expensive to do their own admin are, at high marginal rates, exactly the people for whom paying someone to do their private chores is hardest to justify, and paying someone to do their business chores is easiest.

One instrument can cancel the asymmetry completely, and it is worth naming rather than quantifying because its parameters move. Several countries grant a tax credit on domestic services — in France under article 199 sexdecies of the tax code, at a percentage of the amount spent within an annual ceiling that finance acts revise. The algebra is clean: a credit at rate k turns the household cost from C into C times one minus k, so the household threshold and the business threshold become equal exactly when k equals your marginal rate m. Below that the household version is still the dearer way to buy the same hour; above it, the cheaper one. Look up the rate and ceiling in force before you rely on either.

Where delegating never pays, and it is not a small group

The first case is the largest. An employee paid a fixed salary for fixed hours, with no overtime and no side income, converts no freed hour into money at all. The conversion fraction is zero, the threshold is division by zero, and no hourly value is high enough. This is not a quibble: it covers most people who read articles about the value of their time, and it is why the calculation feels wrong to them even when they cannot say why. Delegating may still be an excellent idea for them — rest, health and family are not accounting categories — but it is spending, not investing, and calling it an investment is how a good decision gets defended with a bad argument.

The second case is transaction cost. Finding, briefing and settling in a person takes your own hours, and that one-off charge is spread over the hours you eventually delegate. Four hours of search and onboarding against twenty-four hours delegated over a year adds an effective sixteen points to the supervision share, pushing the threshold from 133 to 164 an hour. Against five hundred hours a year the same four hours add under one point. Small, occasional delegations are structurally uneconomic in a way large regular ones are not, and no hourly rate fixes it.

The third case is rework, and it has a hard stop. If correcting the delegated work costs you a quarter of an hour for every hour delegated, on top of a tenth spent briefing, the freed fraction falls to 0.65 and the threshold rises from 133 to 185. If it costs you nine tenths of an hour, the freed fraction is zero and the threshold is infinite: you have paid someone to keep you exactly as busy as you were. Every experienced delegator has met this case, and it is why the honest question is never what the person charges but how much of the hour actually comes back to you.

What the help actually costs, if you hire rather than buy

There are two ways to buy an hour of someone else's time and they price differently. Buying a service means paying an invoice that already contains the provider's own contributions, insurance, unbillable time and margin — the number is high but it is the whole number. Employing someone means paying gross wages plus the employer's compulsory contributions, which on 2026 French rules run to 41.5 % of gross above three times the minimum wage; below that level a single degressive reduction cancels a large part of them, which is precisely the range most domestic and junior support work sits in. Neither route is inherently cheaper, and comparing an hourly invoice to an hourly wage without the employer's side is the same error as comparing a day rate to a salary.

Your own marginal rate is the other input to find, and it is not the average rate on your payslip. In France for 2026 the income tax scale on 2025 income runs at 0 % up to 11,600 euros per share of the household, then 11 % to 29,579, 30 % to 84,577, 41 % to 181,917 and 45 % above — and for a self-employed person social contributions sit on top of that, which is how marginal rates in the fifties and sixties arise. In Germany for 2026 the tax-free allowance is 12,348 euros, the 42 % zone runs from 69,879 to 277,825, and 45 % applies from 277,826. The marginal rate is the one on the next euro you earn, and it is the number that belongs in the formula.

What would change the verdict

Everything above prices one thing only: money. Three considerations sit outside it and routinely dominate it, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. Some tasks carry compounding value — the first year of doing your own books teaches you where the money goes, and delegating from day one buys back time at the cost of never understanding the business. Some tasks are load-bearing for wellbeing in a way no threshold captures, and an hour of sleep is worth more than an hour of turnover to a person who is not getting enough of either. And some tasks are simply enjoyable, which is a reason to keep them that needs no justification at all.

The useful discipline is to keep the two accounts separate rather than to merge them. Run the threshold, find out whether the decision pays in money, and then decide — with that number in view — whether the non-monetary reasons are strong enough to overrule it. That is a defensible way to end up delegating something the arithmetic says you should not. Deciding first and then reverse-engineering an hourly rate that endorses it is not.

Frequently asked questions

I bill 653 euros a day. Surely a 30-euro-an-hour cleaner is obviously worth it?

Not obviously, no. Over seven billable hours that day rate is 93.29 an hour of turnover. At a 50 % marginal rate and a tenth of the hour spent supervising, the most you can afford to pay is 93.29 times the share of the freed time you actually sell, times 0.5, times 0.9 — so 41.98 an hour if you sell every freed hour, 20.99 if you sell half. The 30-euro cleaner therefore breaks even at a conversion rate of about 71 %: you have to turn seven of every ten freed hours into invoiced work for it to pay in money. The same 30 euros spent inside the business, where it is deductible, breaks even at about 36 %. Most people who make this argument are converting nowhere near 71 %, which does not mean they should not hire a cleaner — it means the reason is time and sanity rather than arithmetic.

Why does the marginal rate disappear from the business threshold?

Because it applies to both sides of the comparison and divides out. The turnover you gain from the freed hour is taxed at your marginal rate, so its after-tax value is the turnover times one minus that rate. The expense you pay is deductible, so its after-tax cost is the price times one minus the same rate. Set the two equal, cancel the common factor, and the condition reduces to turnover per hour being at least the price divided by the conversion share and by one minus the supervision share. A household expense is not deductible, so only the income side carries the factor, and the rate stays in — which is the entire source of the two-to-one gap at a 50 % rate.

Can I count the hour I free up at my average hourly earnings?

No — the relevant number is marginal, not average. Your average earnings per hour include hours you were already going to work; the question here is what one additional hour is worth, which is either the price of work you can actually sell or nothing. For most salaried people the marginal figure is zero. For a freelancer with a full order book it is the day rate divided by billable hours. For a freelancer with a thin pipeline it is the day rate multiplied by the probability of finding the work, which is usually well under one. The same distinction applies to the tax rate: the average rate on your last return is not the rate on the next euro, and only the second belongs in the formula.

Does a tax credit on household services change the answer?

Substantially, and in an unusually clean way. Such a credit reduces what the help actually costs you from its price to its price times one minus the credit rate, so it moves the household threshold down proportionally. The two thresholds become exactly equal when the credit rate equals your marginal rate: at that point buying an hour of help privately costs you the same as buying it through the business, and the whole asymmetry disappears. France operates such a credit under article 199 sexdecies of the tax code, at a percentage of qualifying expenditure within an annual ceiling. Both parameters are revised by finance acts, so look up the ones in force rather than reusing a figure from an article.

Should I delegate the tasks I am worst at, or the ones I am best at?

Neither framing is quite right, and the formula says why. What matters is the ratio between what the hour costs to buy and what your hour is worth in its highest-value use, adjusted for how much of the hour actually comes back to you. Tasks you are bad at look attractive to delegate but often have the highest rework fraction, which is the term that can drive the threshold to infinity. Tasks you are good at have the lowest rework fraction but are frequently the ones generating your turnover, so delegating them delegates the income too and the conversion share collapses. The tasks that clear the threshold most easily are the ones you are competent at, do not enjoy, that recur often enough to amortise the onboarding, and that nobody is paying you for.