Let's do some maths you probably haven't wanted to do.
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Since April 2025, employer National Insurance has risen from 13.8% to 15% — and the threshold at which employers start paying it dropped from £9,100 to just £5,000 a year (Sage). That's not a rounding error. That's a structural increase in the cost of every single person you put on payroll, applied retroactively to your entire team the moment it landed.
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The knock-on effect has been exactly what you'd expect: 22% of the UK's 1.4 million SME employers now say they plan to reduce headcount to absorb the cost, 35% are slowing hiring altogether, and 59% expect to raise prices just to stay level (Law Donut). Two-thirds of SME leaders estimate the rise will cost them over £10,000 each, annually, before a single new hire is even considered.
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So here's the actually important question: if headcount just got structurally more expensive, is a full-time hire still the right answer for the role you're about to open?
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The number nobody puts in the job ad

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When founders think about hiring, they think about salary. £45k for a finance manager. £70k for a Head of Finance. Reasonable enough, on paper.
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What rarely makes it into that mental maths: employer NI at 15%, pension contributions, recruitment fees, onboarding time, the training runway before someone is actually productive, and the fact that a single senior finance hire in the UK typically costs £50,000–£150,000 a year before they've delivered a pound of value — a number that's only gone up since April.
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And that's for one person, doing one job function, at one level of seniority. What happens when you need bookkeeping and analysis and someone who can actually sit across from an investor and defend your model? Suddenly you're not hiring one person. You're building a department. With NI, pension, and recruitment costs stacked on every seat.
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Why "fractional" stops being a buzzword and starts being maths

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This is where the fractional model earns its keep — not as a trendy alternative, but as a straightforward response to a straightforward cost problem. Instead of one full-time hire absorbing a £50k–£150k salary line (plus 15% NI on top, plus pension, plus the six months it takes to get properly useful), you get access to bookkeeping, analyst-level systems work, and CFO-grade strategic input — scaled to what you actually need, when you actually need it.
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Finance leadership. Without the headcount.
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That's not a slogan for its own sake. It's the direct answer to a market where the cost of a headcount decision just moved against you, structurally, by government policy — not by anything you did wrong.
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This isn't about avoiding good hires

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To be clear: this isn't an argument against ever hiring in-house. At a certain stage, a full-time finance lead is exactly right, and a good one is worth every penny. But that stage is usually later than founders think — and the NI rise has quietly moved the break-even point even further out.
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The founders getting this right aren't the ones avoiding finance headcount altogether. They're the ones being deliberate about when a full-time seat actually pencils out versus when fractional support gets them 90% of the value at a fraction of the fixed cost — with the flexibility to scale up the moment the business actually needs it.
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Before your next finance hire, run the real numbers — not just the salary, the whole cost stack including the NI increase that landed in April. Then ask whether that number, divided by the hours of genuinely senior work you need each month, still makes sense.
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Often it doesn't. And that's a good thing to find out before the offer letter goes out, not six months into the contract.
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Want a straight read on whether your next finance hire should be full-time or fractional? Book a free hour with xpand — we'll run the numbers with you.
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Sources: Sage — Employers' National Insurance: How the 2025 rise affects businesses; Law Donut — National Insurance rise impacts small business hiring plans

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