Subcontractor or employee: a web designer's first hire

Hiring a subcontractor vs an employee for web design work is a question most freelancers only think about properly once the diary is already full. Work is steady, you are turning jobs away or working weekends to keep up, and someone suggests bringing in help. The two routes look similar from the outside, another person doing website work under your name, but they differ in cost, control and how much you are committing to, and getting the choice wrong is expensive in a way that is hard to unwind quickly.

What actually differs day to day

A subcontractor is running their own business and deciding, within reason, how the work gets done: which tools they use, what hours they work, whether they take the job on at all. An employee works under your direction, uses your process, and is available when you need them because that availability is what you are paying a salary for. The distinction sounds abstract until you picture it in practice. If you are telling someone exactly which hours to be online, giving them a laptop, and expecting them to say yes to whatever comes in that week, you are describing an employee even if the arrangement is on paper a subcontract. That gap matters, because engaging someone as self-employed when the relationship actually looks like employment can create tax and legal problems for you later, not just for them. If there is any doubt, it is worth a conversation with an accountant before the arrangement starts, not after HMRC asks about it.

The cost comparison that is easy to get wrong

A subcontractor's day rate looks expensive next to a salary until you add up everything a salary actually includes. Employer's National Insurance, pension contributions, sick pay, holiday pay, equipment, software licences and the admin time of running payroll all sit on top of the headline wage, and none of it appears in a subcontractor's invoice. A subcontractor is also work you can simply stop giving, in a quiet month, without the notice period and process that comes with letting an employee go. That flexibility has real value when your own workload still moves around from month to month, which for most freelance web designers it does.

What a subcontractor buys you

The main advantage of a subcontractor is that you can test whether a second pair of hands actually helps before committing to the cost and responsibility of an employee. Bring someone in for one overflow project, see how their build quality holds up, how well they communicate with a client directly, whether the work still reads as consistent with what you would have produced yourself. None of that requires a contract of employment or a long commitment on either side. It is a lower-stakes way to find out whether growing the business actually needs more hands, or just better scoping and pricing on the jobs you already have, a question covered in scoping website projects so they stay profitable.

When an employee actually makes more sense

A subcontractor stops being the right answer once the work you need is steady, exclusive to you, and needs someone embedded in how you run things rather than dipping in for one project at a time. If the same person is doing work for you every week, taking direction from you on how it is done, and effectively unavailable to take other clients, calling that arrangement subcontracting is both inaccurate and risky. An employee also tends to build institutional knowledge a subcontractor never gets the chance to: your pricing logic, your audit checklist, the way you talk to a joiner in Preston versus a dentist in Solihull. That knowledge compounds in a way that repeatedly briefing a new subcontractor for each job does not.

Decide from the workload, not from ambition

The honest test is whether the backlog of paying work is genuine and sustained, not whether the business would look more established with a second name on the website. A month of full diary proves nothing on its own. A steady run of it, turning down the kind of jobs you actually want at a price you are happy to charge, is a real signal, and the same one covered in growing from a freelancer to a small agency. Whichever route you choose, pricing and tracking need to work across two people rather than one before the second person starts, which is a different exercise to pricing your own time, covered in pricing retainers for a small web design agency.

Where that backlog comes from matters here too. If the workload justifying a first hire is being generated by steady outbound prospecting rather than referrals that could dry up, it is worth knowing the pipeline behind it is repeatable before you commit to paying someone else out of it. Patchscout's team workspaces are built for exactly this point in a business: per-person mailboxes and a shared pipeline mean a subcontractor or a new employee can start prospecting under their own name on day one, with you still seeing the same activity and results.

The three free searches at app.patchscout.co.uk/signup work the same whether you are running them solo or checking whether there is enough real demand to justify bringing someone else in.