Three options, three completely different shapes of cost. A fractional marketer bills you monthly and stops when you stop paying. An agency bills you monthly and brings people you did not have to interview. A full-time hire costs you something neither of the others does: a fixed line in your burn that you cannot switch off in a bad quarter.
Most founders compare the three on a monthly number. That is the wrong frame, and it is why this decision keeps getting made badly.
Price the hire against the runway, not against a budget
A budget line is something you revisit at the end of the quarter. Runway is the number of months you have left before you need to raise or be profitable. Two of these three options are variable cost, and you can end them with a month of notice. The third is a person with a life built around the salary you offered them.
So the question is not which option is cheapest. It is how many months of runway you are willing to convert into a commitment you will find hard to reverse.
What a first marketing hire actually costs
Start with the salary, then add the parts nobody quotes you.
Job Bank's wage report for Marketing Specialist, NOC 11202, gives a low of $20.50 an hour, a median of $35.58 and a high of $57.44 across Canada, drawn from the Labour Force Survey with a 2023 to 2024 reference period (sourced from Job Bank).
Converted to a year, the median is roughly $69,000 at 37.5 hours a week and roughly $74,000 at 40 hours a week. That conversion is my arithmetic and not Job Bank's, which publishes hourly wages rather than salaries. Treat it as a starting point, you will adjust for your city and for the seniority you actually need.
Then the employer costs on top:
Canada Pension Plan. For 2026 the employer rate is 5.95 percent on pensionable earnings above the $3,500 basic exemption, up to maximum pensionable earnings of $74,600, which caps the employer contribution at $4,230.45 (sourced from the Canada Revenue Agency).
Employment Insurance. For 2026 the employee rate outside Quebec is $1.63 per $100 of insurable earnings and the employer pays 1.4 times that, on maximum insurable earnings of $68,900, giving a maximum employer premium of $1,572.30. Quebec's rates are lower because the province runs its own parental insurance plan (sourced from the Canada Revenue Agency).
Provincial payroll tax, if you are large enough to owe it. In British Columbia the employer health tax does not apply at BC remuneration of $1,000,000 or less, so a first hire will not trigger it. Other provinces set their own thresholds, so check yours rather than assuming (sourced from the Government of British Columbia).
Add those to a $74,000 salary and you are near $80,000 a year before a laptop, a software stack, a recruiter, vacation coverage, or the hours you will spend managing someone for the first time. Call it a little over $6,500 a month, committed, in months that go well and months that do not.
What a fractional marketer costs, and what you are buying
I am not going to print a market rate for fractional work here, and you should be wary of anyone who does without showing you their sample. The published surveys that get quoted for this are either American or several years old, or both, and a number with no methodology behind it is worse than no number at all.
What I can describe is the shape of it. You are buying senior judgement in small amounts. Someone who has done this before decides what to do, in what order, and why. The failure mode is obvious once you have lived it: the judgement arrives, the plan is sound, and there is nobody to actually build the pages, write the emails or run the campaigns. Fractional works best when you already have hands, and badly when you do not.
What an agency costs, and what you are buying
An agency is judgement plus hands, on a contract you can end. You are also buying a process that already exists, which matters more than founders expect, because the alternative is inventing one while you are busy.
The failure mode here is generic work: a playbook applied to your company without anyone properly learning your product. That risk is manageable, and you manage it at the scoping stage, not six months in.
The local business version of this same comparison, agency, freelancer or your first marketing hire, works through the three options for a business with a storefront. Different reader, same trade-offs, and worth reading alongside this.
Ramp time is a cost, and nobody puts it in the model
A new hire is not productive on their first Monday. They have to learn your product, your buyer and your market before their judgement is worth anything, and at a startup, nobody is free to teach them. An agency ramps up faster because the process is already in place, but it still spends its first weeks learning what you sell. Fractional ramps are the fastest and go the least deep.
None of that is a reason to pick one over another. It is a reason to be honest with yourself about the calendar before you sign anything.
A short way to decide
Look at the runway first. Under about twelve months, a fixed salary is a hard thing to justify unless marketing is the constraint on your next raise.
Ask whether you know what needs doing. If the honest answer is no, hiring a person to figure it out is an expensive way to find out. Running an audit first is cheaper and takes weeks, not quarters.
Count the disciplines. One thing that needs to be done constantly, such as content or lifecycle emails, is a good fit for a hire. Five things that each need doing occasionally, such as positioning, pages, technical SEO, email and paid, suit a team.
Be honest about management. A first marketing hire with no marketing manager above them reports to you. If you do not have a view on what good looks like, you will not be able to tell whether it is going well until the quarter ends.
The part that actually decides it
Every founder I talk to asks what a marketer costs. It is the wrong question, and the right one is harder: what do you want this person to be doing on their first Monday morning, and are you confident enough in that answer to commit a fixed cost against your runway to it?
If you can answer the second question, the first one mostly answers itself. If you cannot, that is worth knowing before you post the job.