Burden rates are a way to capture labor costs on your project. Essentially, each person costs you a certain amount to have at your company and when they work on projects, that cost is measured on your projects. The math is simple. It's Rate x Hours = Labor Cost for the tasks and ultimately for your project.

Using Burden Rates is a good way to manage the costs of your projects by knowing just how much money your are spending to get a project done and collectively all your projects. This knowledge will help you do projects that have high value and reasonable costs vs. ones that have high costs and marginal or low value

Where Do I Add in Burden Rates?

Burden Rates are added on a user's profile. You need to be a system administrator or user administrator to add Burden Rates. This Resource Info article explains how to add Burden Rates to a user profile

Who Can See Burden Rates?

System roles Project Report Viewers and PMO Managers see burden rates on all projects, tasks, and time entries they can read, while Project Managers can see Burden Rates on projects they are the PM on

How is the Burden Rate Used?

Work Time 

Work time is the estimated or budgeted cost for each task. This calculation takes the work hours for the task and multiplies it by the burden rate for the person assigned to it. If there are more than one person assigned to the task, PI will calculate the cost for each person on the task. The task will then reflect the weighted average of each person's cost. See the Work Estimate Rate Flow article for how rates are applied on tasks

Single Assignment

Multiple Assignments

Actual Time

Actual Time is based on your users' time entries. It is Actual Hours x Burden Rate. This is calculated for each time entry added by each of your users. See the Time Entry Rate Flow article for how Burden Rates are applied for time entries

Ok Cool, but I don't want People Seeing Users' Hourly Wage!

A common question or objection.

The article, "How to Keep People from Seeing Users' Hourly Wage" explains the usual ways financial teams calculate Burden Rates.