The Cost of Work Index

The Cost of Work Index

Per-unit human labour cost vs. AI-employee cost across 13 back-office tasks in three markets (United States, Greece, Ukraine). A small, fully-sourced dataset published under CC BY 4.0, with an MIT-licensed MCP server.

What this measures

For each task ("enter a supplier invoice", "chase an overdue invoice", "screen one candidate") the dataset records two numbers:

• Human cost per unit: the published hourly labour cost for that market, divided by the human minutes the task takes.
• AI cost per unit: the advertised per-unit price of the matching Nika AI employee.

The multiple is the ratio of the two. A multiple above 1 means the AI employee is cheaper per unit; below 1 means a person is cheaper.

What's in the data

• 3 markets: United States (USD), Greece (EUR), Ukraine (UAH)
• 13 tasks across back-office functions (bookkeeping, scheduling, support, collections, quoting, candidate screening)
• 39 human-vs-AI cost comparisons (13 tasks × 3 markets)
• 3 hourly labour cost figures, one per market

The two kinds of number

The dataset is explicit about which figures are statistics and which are estimates:

• Cited: carries a publisher, a resolvable URL, a reference period, and a retrieval date. The three hourly labour costs are cited from BLS, Eurostat, and Derzhstat.
• Estimate: the human-minutes-per-unit figures are Nika's own estimates, labelled as such and documented with their written basis per task.

Sources

#	Publisher	Figure	Period
1	U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics	Bookkeeping median hourly wage ($23.66)	May 2024
2	Eurostat	Greek whole-economy hourly labour cost (€16.70)	2024
3	Derzhstat (Ukraine)	Average monthly wage (UAH 196.78/h)	June 2026

Caveats (carried in the dataset itself)

• humanMinutesPerUnit is a Nika estimate, not an official statistic. Its basis is stated per task in humanMinutesBasis.
• Hourly labour costs are not like-for-like across markets: the US and Ukraine figures are gross wage only, while the Greek figure is fully loaded and already includes employer contributions.
• For some tasks in some markets a person is cheaper per unit than the AI employee. Those rows are real and are not filtered out. Check multiple.
• Employees marked waitlist are not yet running. Their per-unit price is the advertised price, not a measured one.

License

• Code (src/, Dockerfile): MIT. See LICENSE.
• Data (data/): CC BY 4.0: free to use and cite with attribution.

Citation

Nika (hirenika.com). The Cost of Work Index, version 2026.3, 2026-08-04. https://hirenika.com/cost-of-work

Files

• data/cost-of-work-2026.3.json: full dataset (tasks, markets, sources, caveats)
• data/cost-of-work-2026.3.csv: tabular export

Resources

• The canonical page, with full methodology, per-row bases, and live figures: https://hirenika.com/cost-of-work
• Machine-readable REST API (no key, CORS open): https://hirenika.com/api/v1/cost-of-work
• Nika, the AI employees behind the per-unit pricing: https://hirenika.com

MCP server

The index ships as an MCP server so agents can query it directly:

npx -y nika-cost-of-work-mcp

Five tools: list all tasks, get per-unit cost for a task and market, estimate monthly/annual cost from a volume, list the official sources, and export the whole index as JSON. The dataset is bundled, so the server answers offline; no API key is required. The server source lives in this repository (src/, Dockerfile), and the npm package is published from the hirenika repository where the data snapshot is generated, never hand-edited.