Is your contractor actually an employee?

Why misclassification is expensive

When a contractor is reclassified as an employee, the bill is rarely small. The company can be made to pay the employer social-security contributions it never withheld, often backdated several years, plus interest and penalties, plus unpaid holiday, notice and sometimes pension entitlements. In stricter jurisdictions the liability now sits with the hiring company, not the worker, so it is your exposure to manage. This tool is built to surface that risk before an inspector or a disgruntled ex-contractor does.

How the score is built

There is no single global test, but the national ones rub together at the same pressure points. This checker scores six of them: how much control you have over the work, how integrated the person is in your team, whether they are exclusive to you, how long and continuous the engagement is, who supplies the equipment, and how they are paid. Control and integration carry the most weight because almost every test leans on them hardest. Each answer scores from contractor-like to employee-like, the weighted total is normalised to 0-100, and the worker's country then nudges it up or down to reflect how aggressively that jurisdiction enforces.

Red, amber, green, and what to do

The per-factor breakdown shows you exactly which parts of the relationship are pulling the score up. A green factor already looks like genuine self-employment; an amber or red one is where you are exposed. The de-risk steps are generated from your own answers, so they tell you specifically what to change: drop the exclusivity clause, stop directing the hours, have the contractor use their own tools, pay against invoices for defined deliverables. Make those changes for real, not just on paper, and re-run the check.

When de-risking is not enough

Sometimes the honest answer is that the relationship is employment and no amount of contract wording will fix it, because the person works set hours, on your equipment, exclusively for you, on the org chart. In that case the clean route is to employ them properly. If they are in another country and you have no entity there, an Employer of Record becomes the legal employer for you, which is why a high-risk result surfaces that option. If you would rather compare the cost of that route first, our global hiring cost calculator prices an EOR against opening your own entity.

An honest note on the link and the data

The whole check runs in your browser. Nothing you answer is stored or sent anywhere. The only network call is if you choose to unlock the country cheat sheet by email, which simply adds you to the list so we can send the PDF and tell you when the guidance is updated. When a result is moderate or high risk, the page shows an Employer of Record option that is an affiliate link, so a signup may earn us a commission at no extra cost to you. It only appears when the score genuinely suggests a problem, never on a clean result, because that is the only version of this that is worth your trust.

Worker classification questions, answered