The hidden cost of low-value tasks to Australian business owners
Small business owners don’t just run their business. They run payroll, delivering orders, answer emails and fix whatever breaks before they even get to the work that grows the business.
We call the cost of that lost time your Founder Tax: the opportunity cost of spending hours on jobs that don’t need you personally. Airtasker surveyed 254 Australian founders to measure it, and found a median Founder Tax of $33,989 a year, more than 21 working weeks lost to admin, customer service, cleaning and more. Scaled across Australia’s 2.7 million small businesses, that opportunity cost tops $92 billion a year.
Below, you can find out more on how much you’re losing to Founder Tax with an interactive calculator, the tasks that eat up the most time, how founders approach outsourcing and the human cost of taking on low-value work.
Key takeaways
- Customer service is costing founders almost 200 hours a year, and almost nobody is outsourcing it. The average founder spends 4 hours per week on customer service, more than any other task category and the equivalent of nearly 196 hours per year. Yet only 7.8% of those who outsource anything have handed it off.
- The most common reason for not outsourcing is that founders think it’s faster to do the task themselves(65%), followed by over half who say they cannot afford it (54.7%). More than a third simply like to be in control (35.4%).
- Half of all small business owners can’t switch off, and the younger the founder, the worse it gets. 50.8% of founders report difficulty switching off after hours, and 40.9% report poor sleep. Under-35 founders report the highest burnout rate of any age group at 55.3%.
- The bigger the business, the bigger the opportunity cost. A sole trader’s Founder Tax is $25,362 a year; for small business owners it’s $162,315, more than six times higher, even though they only work about double the delegatable hours.
$34k
The amount founders spend per year on tasks that could be outsourced.
Ready to find out?
Calculate your Founder Tax
How many hours do you work in a typical week?
Be honest — evenings and weekends count.
How many people work in the business, including you?
Full-time equivalent — two part-timers count as one.
What's your annual business revenue?
Your best estimate is fine.
How many weeks a year do you work?
Most founders land between 46 and 50.
Which of these do you do yourself?
Tap any that apply, don't overthink it.
How much time do they take?
Use −/+ to set roughly how long each takes, and how often. No need to be exact.
Working out your effective hourly rate
Your Founder Tax
That's how much you're paying yourself each year to do work you could delegate.
Task Breakdown
Airtasker prices are weighted median task prices from platform data covering July 2025 to June 2026. Actual prices vary. See full methodology for details.
As a business grows, so does the price of the founder's own time.
As a business grows, the cost of the founder’s time rises faster than their ability to delegate. A sole trader loses 13.5 hours a week to low-value tasks. A small business owner loses 28.3 hours per week, roughly double. But their Founder Tax is more than six times larger, because every hour is now worth significantly more.
Value-Based Founder Tax by Industry
Running a trades business means your time is quite literally money. While you might only spend around 15 hours a week on delegatable tasks, those non-billable hours carry the highest Founder Tax at $53,261 a year. That is more than double what creative founders lose for the same amount of time. It’s not just about losing hours though, it’s about what those hours are worth to your business. Every minute you spend on a delegatable task instead of high-value work is costing you big time.
Which delegatable tasks do founders spend the most time on?
Customer service is the single biggest time drain, accounting for nearly four hours a week, almost 200 hours a year, more than any other task category. The top three tasks alone, customer service, admin, and accounting, consume an average of nearly nine hours per week combined, close to a full working day every week.
Across all 13 task categories, the average founder spends 19.5 hours per week on delegatable tasks, the equivalent of nearly half their working week. Over a year, that adds up to almost 950 hours in total time lost to tasks that don’t require the founder personally. (given a typical 40 hour working week).
The average founder spends 19.5 hours p/w on delegatable tasks
Why won’t founders let go of tasks?
Speed and cost are the two dominant reasons founders keep doing low-value tasks themselves. Two-thirds (65%) say it’s faster to do it themselves, and over half (54.7%) say they can’t afford to outsource. Notably, more than a third (35.4%) of respondents cited both reasons simultaneously, suggesting perceived cost and speed barriers are often felt together rather than as separate objections.
More than a third of founders (35.4%) say the real reason they don’t outsource is control – a psychological barrier no pricing model can fix. Add the 29.9% who simply enjoy the work, and over half of founders (50.4%) hold onto tasks for reasons that have nothing to do with time or money. Another 14.6% haven’t even considered outsourcing, showing awareness matters as much as cost.
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Most common tasks founders outsource
Accounting is overwhelmingly the first thing founders hand off, with 71.6% of outsourcers delegating it. Yet it ranks only third in time cost at 2.2 hours per week, which suggests founders are outsourcing based on complexity or expertise requirements rather than pure time burden. The task they spend the most time on, customer service, is outsourced by fewer than one in ten.
The primary reason founders choose to outsource is skills, not time. 48.2% say they needed skills they didn’t have in-house, well ahead of focus on core work (33.3%) and simply not having enough hours in the day and reducing stress and burnout (both 20.6%). This reframes outsourcing as a capability decision as much as a time management one.
The benefits of outsourcing are more than just saving time. Among those who outsource, 43.3% report more headspace for high-value work, 39% report better mental health, and 31.9% report more time with family. Turns out, taking a load off is just as good for your wellbeing as it is for your business.
The human cost of doing it all yourself
Over half (50.8%) of founders report moderate or higher stress, with 38.2% moderately stressed, the most common response, and only 18.1% not stressed at all.
Stress falls with age: 66% of under-35 founders report moderate or higher stress, versus 34.1% of those 65+, hinting that ownership gets easier over time, or that older founders are the ones who’ve learned to manage it.
Retail founders are the most stressed of any industry (73.9%), and despite also having the highest outsourcing rate (69.6%), delegation alone clearly isn’t enough to offset the demands of running a product-based business.
2 in 3
of under-35 founders report moderate or higher stress
51
%
of founders report difficulty switching off after hours.
75
%
of founders with children under 18 have reported missing some time with their kids due to work demands.
Effects Experienced From Running a Business
Half of all small business owners (50.8%) report difficulty switching off after hours, making it the single most common negative effect of running a business. This figure matches precisely with the proportion who report being moderately, very, or extremely stressed (also 50.8%), a coincidence that points to an always-on work culture as a defining feature of the small business experience.
Weeknight Evenings and Weekend Work
Despite widespread reports of burnout and poor sleep, only 18.9% of founders keep evenings and weekends completely free. At the other end, 13.4% work most or almost all of their evenings and weekends, effectively operating without a boundary between work and personal life. Among the 34.6% of founders with children under 18, three quarters (75%) report missing at least some time with their kids due to work demands.
Stop paying the Founder Tax
You’ve seen what low-value tasks are costing you. Post a task on Airtasker and get the hours back today.
About the data
The Founder Tax report is based on an online survey commissioned by Airtasker and conducted by third-party research provider Octopus Group. The survey included 260 Australian small business owners and was conducted in June 2026. Eligible respondents were owners, co-founders, or directors of a business with fewer than 200 employees, personally involved in day-to-day operations. This included a small number of medium-sized businesses (20 to 199 employees); given the limited sample size for this group, findings are reported individually for sole traders, micro, and small businesses, with medium-sized businesses included in national totals only. The survey measured how founders allocate their time, which tasks they handle personally, their income, and the broader impact of running a business on stress, relationships, and personal life.
As is standard with self-reported survey data, a small number of responses required adjustment prior to analysis. Some respondents reported task hours exceeding their total working hours and were either excluded or proportionally adjusted to maintain calculation integrity. A small number of respondents did not disclose personal income and are excluded from the income-based comparison only. Following this process, 254 respondents were used for the primary Founder Tax calculations and 238 for the income-based comparison.
State-level findings are reported for New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, and South Australia, each meeting the minimum sample size for reliable reporting. Remaining states and territories are grouped due to smaller sample sizes.
Respondents selected the industry that best described their business from six categories, with the option to describe their own where none fit. Free-text responses that clearly matched a named category were reassigned accordingly.
Survey questions on sensitive figures such as income and revenue used response bands rather than exact values. Calculations are based on the midpoint of each band, with conservative estimates applied where a band has no upper limit. The same approach was applied to weeks worked per year and task frequency, both of which inform the Founder Tax and Gap calculations.
The report presents two measures of the Founder Tax.
- The Value-Based Founder Tax reflects the value a founder generates for their business per hour, calculated from annual revenue divided across staff and working hours, representing the opportunity cost of time spent on tasks that could be delegated.
- The Pay-Based Founder Tax uses personal income rather than revenue and produces a more conservative result, as many small business owners pay themselves below the market value of their time.
The two measures are not additive; they represent two perspectives on the same underlying cost rather than separate amounts.
Median figures are used as the primary reported statistic throughout. Means are reported alongside as an upper estimate where relevant, but medians are used as the headline because a small number of high-revenue businesses would otherwise skew the average away from the typical founder experience.
The report also calculates an Airtasker Gap: an estimate of how much of the Founder Tax could be recovered by delegating tasks at typical Airtasker prices. This is calculated individually for each survey respondent based on their own hourly rate, and only applies where outsourcing costs less than the founder’s time is worth for a given task. The national median Gap of $2,784 reflects the middle result across all 254 respondents. Airtasker pricing data covers the 12 months to May 2026. Human resources and event management are included in the Founder Tax but excluded from the Gap calculation due to insufficient comparable pricing data on the platform.
National business population figures used to scale findings to a national total are drawn from the Australian Bureau of Statistics CABEE Datacube 2 (June 2025), which provides counts of Australian businesses by state, industry, and employment size. Survey responses were mapped to these figures using matching industry classifications; a small number of classifications required judgement where a business could reasonably sit across more than one category.
The interactive calculator applies the same methodology to each user’s own inputs. Where a founder’s hourly rate is high enough that outsourcing a task costs less than their time is worth, a financial Gap is shown for that task. Where this is not the case, the calculator shows the time saving available and the estimated monthly cost of outsourcing, so founders can make their own assessment of whether the trade is worthwhile.
The Founder Tax and Airtasker Gap figures, including those generated by the interactive calculator, are estimates based on self-reported survey data and are intended to illustrate the potential opportunity cost of time spent on delegatable tasks. They are not financial advice and should not be relied upon as a precise measure of any individual business’s circumstances.