Paper
What a community team costs
Draft. The figures are being checked by the founders.
If you are deciding whether to hire for your community or to buy software for it, the honest comparison is what the hire actually costs an employer: pay, plus everything the law obliges an employer to pay on top. This paper collects that figure for community roles in ten cities, shows how each one is built, and says how CommonOS is priced beside it. Where the evidence is thin, the cell says so rather than guessing.
How each figure is built.
Pay comes from the two sources that publish city-level figures for these titles: Glassdoor, which is reported by employees, and Indeed, which is drawn from adverts and reported pay. For each city and title we take the midpoint of the published base pay range, annualising it where the source publishes a monthly figure. That midpoint is the middle of a 25th-to-75th percentile range, not a median; Glassdoor publishes a median only for total pay, which includes bonuses.
To that we add the statutory employer cost, computed at that level of pay from the official rates rather than by adding up headline percentages, because most of the charges have thresholds or ceilings. What goes into each one is set out under “What the law adds” below. Local figures are converted at mid-market rates read on 17 September 2026[45].
One caveat governs everything below, and it is worth saying once, plainly. Community Manager is not a single job. On both sources the title mixes membership and online community roles with coworking, residential property and social media ones; the most common employers on the London page are serviced-office operators. The figures are a fair picture of people with this job title, not of people who run a community.
What a hire costs an employer.
Every row is base pay plus statutory employer costs only. Nothing else is included: no benefits, no equipment, no software, no recruitment, no office space, no management time.
| City | Role | Base midpoint | Statutory on-cost | Fully loaded | In GBP | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| London | Community Manager | £37,500 | £5,813 (15.5%) | £43,313 | £43,313 | Glassdoor, 938 reports [1] |
| London | Community Manager | £38,524 | £5,997 (15.6%) | £44,521 | £44,521 | Indeed, 212 reports [2] |
| London | Senior Community Manager | £42,000 | £6,623 (15.8%) | £48,623 | £48,623 | Glassdoor, 35 reports [3] |
| London | Senior Community Manager | £46,855 | £7,497 (16.0%) | £54,352 | £54,352 | Indeed, 16 reports [4] |
| London | Head of Community | £58,000 | £9,271 (16.0%) | £67,271 | £67,271 | Glassdoor, 35 reports [5] |
| New York | Community Manager | $72,500 | $6,310 (8.7%) | $78,810 | £59,017 | Glassdoor, 1,437 reports [6] |
| New York | Senior Community Manager | $102,500 | $8,605 (8.4%) | $111,105 | £83,201 | Glassdoor, 79 reports [7] |
| New York | Head of Community | $160,500 | $13,042 (8.1%) | $173,542 | £129,957 | Glassdoor, 14 reports [8] |
| San Francisco | Community Manager | $74,000 | $5,948 (8.0%) | $79,948 | £59,869 | Glassdoor, 774 reports [9] |
| San Francisco | Community Manager | $99,705 | $7,914 (7.9%) | $107,619 | £80,590 | Indeed, 71 adverts; disagrees [10] |
| San Francisco | Senior Community Manager | $110,000 | $8,702 (7.9%) | $118,702 | £88,890 | Glassdoor, 46 reports [11] |
| San Francisco | Head of Community | $187,000 | $14,438 (7.7%) | $201,438 | £150,847 | Glassdoor, 10 reports [12] |
| Berlin | Community Manager | €42,000 | €9,404 (22.4%) | €51,404 | £44,171 | Glassdoor, 147 reports [13] |
| Amsterdam | Community Manager | €43,164 | €11,206 (26.0%) | €54,370 | £46,720 | Indeed, 6 reports; weak [14] |
| Dubai | Community Manager | AED 150,000 | AED 8,750 (5.8%) | AED 158,750 | £32,370 | Glassdoor, 35 reports; sources disagree [15] |
| Singapore | Community Manager | S$48,000 | S$8,280 (17.3%) | S$56,280 | £33,029 | Glassdoor, 124 reports [16] |
| Sydney | Community Manager | A$80,000 | A$9,600 (12.0%) | A$89,600 | £47,706 | Glassdoor, 116 reports [17] |
| Cape Town | Community Manager | R300,000 | R5,125 (1.7%) | R305,125 | £14,039 | Glassdoor, 20 reports [18] |
| Johannesburg | Community Manager | R252,000 | R4,645 (1.8%) | R256,645 | £11,808 | Glassdoor, 22 reports [19] |
Where there is no reliable figure.
Senior Community Manager and Head of Community are only shown above for London, New York and San Francisco. Everywhere else the samples are too small to publish, and we have not substituted a national figure, a modelled figure or an average of the two.
| City | Senior Community Manager | Head of Community |
|---|---|---|
| Berlin | Glassdoor, 8 reports: too few to publish | Glassdoor, 5 reports: too few to publish |
| Amsterdam | Glassdoor, 2 reports: no reliable figure | No figures published for the city |
| Dubai | Glassdoor, 2 reports: no reliable figure | No figures published for the city |
| Singapore | Glassdoor, 4 reports: no reliable figure | One report, currency unclear: no reliable figure |
| Sydney | Glassdoor, 1 report: no reliable figure | Glassdoor, 3 reports: no reliable figure |
| Cape Town | Glassdoor, 1 report: no reliable figure | No figures published for the city |
| Johannesburg | Glassdoor, 2 reports: no reliable figure | No figures published for the city |
What the law adds.
These are the statutory employer costs used in the first table, and the effective rate they come to at the levels of pay involved. They are not the whole cost of employing somebody: they are the part an employer cannot choose to skip.
| Jurisdiction | What the employer pays by law | Effective rate here | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | Employer National Insurance at 15% above £5,000 a year, plus the 3% minimum workplace pension on qualifying earnings | 15.5% to 16.0% | [20] [21] |
| United States, New York | Social Security 6.2% up to $184,500, Medicare 1.45%, federal unemployment $42, state unemployment at the new-employer rate on the first $17,600 | 8.1% to 8.7% | [22] [23] [24] [25] |
| United States, San Francisco | Social Security, Medicare, federal unemployment $42, and California unemployment and training taxes on the first $7,000 | 7.7% to 8.0% | [22] [23] [26] |
| Germany | Employer halves of pension 9.3%, unemployment 1.3%, health 8.75% and long-term care 1.8%, the 0.15% insolvency levy and 1.09% average accident insurance | 22.4% | [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] |
| Netherlands | The statutory 8% holiday allowance, then unemployment 2.74%, disability 6.27%, the average differentiated premium 1.52% and the 6.10% health levy up to €79,409 | 26.0% | [32] [33] [34] [35] |
| United Arab Emirates, Dubai | No payroll tax. End-of-service gratuity accrues at 21 days a year, about 5.83% of basic pay. Health cover is a flat premium, not a percentage | 5.8% | [36] [37] |
| Singapore | Central Provident Fund at 17% up to $8,000 a month for citizens and permanent residents, plus the Skills Development Levy | 17.2% | [38] [39] [40] |
| Australia, New South Wales | Superannuation guarantee at 12%. State payroll tax applies only above A$1.2m of group wages | 12.0% | [41] [42] |
| South Africa | Unemployment insurance at 1% up to R17,712 a month, plus the 1% skills development levy | 1.7% to 1.8% | [43] [44] |
About £50,000 a year in London.
One sentence on this site says a community manager in London costs about £50,000 a year. Here is exactly how far the evidence carries it. On statutory costs alone, a London Community Manager comes to £43,313 on the Glassdoor midpoint and £44,521 on the Indeed average; a Senior Community Manager comes to £48,623 and £54,352. So £50,000 describes the senior title on statutory costs alone, and describes the junior title only once ordinary overheads are added.
For that second case the one published all-in multiplier we could find is the US Small Business Administration’s rule of thumb of 1.25 to 1.4 times pay[46], which puts the same London Community Manager at £46,875 to £52,500. It is a rule of thumb from 2019, from another country, and it already contains payroll taxes, so it replaces the statutory column rather than stacking on top of it. We would rather set out the reasoning than assert the round number.
How CommonOS is priced beside that.
One core operating system on a fixed monthly fee, with 250 members included. Add the modules you want, each with its own fee. Above 250 members, a per-member fee that rises a little with each module. The comparison is one person plus CommonOS against a team of five or six.You hold your own model keys and channel accounts. Your data stays yours; our margins are software margins.
Neither side is a complete cost. The hire figures leave out benefits, equipment, recruitment and the management time a person needs. Ours leave out what you pay your model provider and your messaging channel, directly and at their prices. The figures are on the pricing page; for one worked for your own network, book a demo.
How many people one manager can look after.
There is no published industry ratio of members to community managers. We looked, and the practitioners have been saying the same thing for fifteen years[50]. The nearest thing to a number is Dunbar’s estimate of how many relationships one person can sustain: 147.8, with 95% confidence limits from 100.2 to 231.1[48]. It is contested — a re-analysis in 2021 found intervals so wide that its authors concluded no single number can be derived that way[49] — and it is a claim about relationships, not about staffing levels. So this paper gives you what a person costs and leaves the number of people to you. If anyone quotes you a people-per-manager benchmark, ask them for the source.
Limitations.
The title mixes jobs. As above: coworking, property and social media roles sit inside the same title on both sources, and the closer-fitting title, online community manager, has much thinner data.
Two cities have sources that disagree. In San Francisco, Glassdoor’s midpoint and Indeed’s average are 35% apart, so both rows are in the table. In Dubai the three available sources come to £20,909[51], £32,370[15] and £34,363[52] a year fully loaded, with no basis for choosing among them, and it is not clear whether housing and transport allowances are included.
Amsterdam is weak. The Glassdoor page for the city mixes monthly and annual entries, so the figure rests on an Indeed average from six reports last updated in May 2026.
Rounding. Both sources round their published ranges to the nearest thousand, and in Dubai, Singapore, South Africa and the Netherlands that rounding is to the nearest thousand per month, so those annualised midpoints carry an error of several per cent.
Statutory only. The on-costs exclude benefits, equipment, software, recruitment, office space and management time. The largest omission is employer health insurance in the United States, which is not statutory for a small employer but is close to universal in practice, and Dutch pension contributions, which are not statutory either and almost every employer pays. For scale: benefits run at 30% of total compensation across US private industry[47]. US figures also assume the full federal unemployment credit and new-employer state rates, and exclude the New York City payroll mobility tax.
Customary extras. A 13th-month payment in Singapore, a 13th cheque in South Africa and Australian package quoting that may or may not include superannuation are all unclear in the sources, and none of them is in the figures.
Dates. Pay pages update monthly and the exchange rates are a single reading on 17 September 2026. If you are reading this much later, treat the figures as that month’s. The UK pension qualifying band is quoted from an undated government page and should be confirmed as the 2026-27 band before this paper leaves draft.