What sort of return could the average client expect on its PEO investment?  Although it is only one component of the overall value delivered by PEOs, it is still one of the most basic questions prospective clients have when deciding whether to use a PEO—will they experience sufficient cost savings to generate a positive return on their investment?

Research by NAPEO summarized here indicates that a conservative estimate of the expected ROI for PEO clients—based on cost savings alone—is 27.2 percent per year. This ROI estimate is almost certainly an underestimate and is based only on cost savings (it does not incorporate the other important benefits of using a PEO such as improving clients’ ability to attract, motivate, and retain employees, and enabling clients to focus on their core businesses while PEOs handle all HR)

The 27.2 percent estimate is based on calculating cost savings for PEO clients in the following five HR-related areas:

• HR personnel costs;
• Health benefits;
• Workers’ compensation;
• Unemployment insurance (UI); and
• Other external expenditures in areas related directly to HR services (payroll services, benefits, etc.)

What Does an ROI of 27.2% Mean? 

Return on investment (ROI) is the net benefit of an investment divided by the cost of the investment. Cost is the key element in almost all ROI calculations. This is because cost savings are much more tangible and hence more readily quantifiable than value (benefits) created. As a result, most analytically-responsible ROI estimates tend to underestimate the true value of an investment (as is the case here). For a PEO client, the net cost savings benefit of hiring a PEO is equal to the savings that the client experiences as a result of using a PEO minus the cost of being a PEO client. Dividing that by cost yields ROI.

NAPEO calculated clients’ savings based on five different categories of HR-related costs and compared them to the average cost of being a PEO client (PEOs’ average gross profit per WSE from NAPEO’s 2018 Financial Ratio & Operating Statistics (FROS) Survey data). By far, the most significant savings that clients experience from using PEOs are in the areas of HR personnel costs and health benefits costs.

An ROI of 27.2 percent means that for every $1,000 spent on PEO services, an average client would save $1,272, yielding a net (cost savings) benefit of $272 for every $1,000 spent.

It is important to understand that the calculated ROI is an average drawn from all PEO clients in NAPEO’s research database. This means that roughly half of prospective clients would be expected to have an ROI greater than 27.2 percent, while half would be expected to have an ROI lower than that.

Prospective clients most likely to have ROIs even higher than 27.2 percent are those that have above average HR personnel costs and/or above-average health benefits costs per employee. It’s worth noting again that this ROI is based only on cost savings and does not incorporate the important benefits derived from improving clients’ ability to attract, motivate, and retain employees and enabling clients to focus on their core businesses, as documented in NAPEO’s prior research.