Contractor vs permanent staff: the true cost per certifying hour

Every planning meeting eventually hits the same argument: "a contractor B1 costs €650 a day, a permanent one costs us €85,000 a year — the permanent guy is obviously cheaper." Maybe. But both numbers are sticker prices. What your man-hour plan actually buys is certifying hours on the critical path, and neither a salary nor a day rate tells you what one of those costs. Here is the arithmetic I make my students do before they are allowed to have an opinion.

01Shrink the permanent headcount to reality

A permanent B1 on an AW139, fully loaded (salary, social charges, pension, benefits), costs about €95,000 a year. Nominal capacity is 1,760 hours (220 days × 8 h). Now subtract what never reaches a task card:

• Annual leave and public holidays: −35 days
• Recurrent and type training, human factors, EWIS, fuel tank safety: −12 days
• Sickness and absence (industry average): −8 days
• Meetings, admin, toolbox talks, AOG travel standby: −15 days

That leaves roughly 150 productive days — 1,200 hours. And a certifying engineer does not certify all day: supervision, paperwork, troubleshooting and waiting on parts mean perhaps 40% of productive time is actual certification coverage. Call it 480 certifying hours a year.

02Now price the contractor honestly

The €650 day rate is only the beginning of the invoice:

A contractor on a check input certifies a higher share of the day — that is why you hired them — say 55% of an 8-hour day: 4.4 certifying hours. True cost per certifying hour: €878 / 4.4 ≈ €200/h. Within rounding, the same as the permanent engineer.

03So why does the answer change?

Because the comparison only becomes interesting when you add time. The contractor is expensive capacity you can switch off; the permanent engineer is cheaper capacity you pay for in February whether or not a check is in the hangar. The decision rule:

• Baseline demand ≥ ~70% of a head, all year: permanent wins — you would be paying the contractor premium for hours you could have bought on a salary.
• Peaks, seasonal checks, AOG cover, a type you only see twice a year: contractor wins — you are buying 10 weeks of certifying coverage, not 52.
• The trap: using contractors to paper over a permanent shortfall for 12+ months. That is a salary you are paying at €878 a day, plus you carry none of the company knowledge when they leave.

04Put it in the man-hour plan

Your AMC1 145.A.30(d) plan should show the split explicitly: baseline workload covered by permanent certifying hours, the quantified peak covered by contract days, and the cost per certifying hour for each. When the auditor asks why you have four contractors every June, the answer "the plan shows a 220-hour certifying gap for the check season, and contract coverage is the cheapest way to close 220 hours" ends the conversation. Run your own numbers before the season does it for you.