Companies need to run payroll twice a month. $250k is about one months payroll to 25 people. Many companies are a lot larger than that. You also have planned and unexpected expenses and other payments. Many payroll and providers also require you to set up one account where the funds are pulled.
You don’t want to move money around every week, so you keep heathy balance.
It’s also never adjusted for inflation, despite this mess in theory being triggered by raising of interest rates due to super high inflation. 250K when it was set in 2010 is the equivalent of almost $350K now. If we ignore that, then we’re just admitting the number is totally arbitrary and we shouldn’t even bother arguing whether it’s a lot or a little.
Separately, it’s weird that a joint account is insured to 500K but a business account stays at 250K. It actually does weirdly favor wealthy individuals vs. working capital accounts for businesses that might represent many employees.
The sentence clearly means that it was never adjusted from inflation from when it was adjusted to 250K, 12 years ago. You can tell that this is far from being adjusted for inflation since it is now 100K off from what it was in 2010, or 40%. This should be a "neutral" issue with respect to the SVB thing, pegging it to inflation helps everyone in the system.
Obviously people have different salaries but also are payroll taxes and other taxes or fees that also need to be paid like unemployment insurance and whatever else the local government has decided. Sometimes these are collected city/county as well as at state level.
Benefits also cost $500-2500/mo (if you cover 100% employee and 70% dependents).
Not complaining but just saying there are costs that are not always apparent to employees.
also rent, servers, the cost of anything else you have to run your businesses. For broadly generic tech companies, take everyones top line salaries, double them, that is your rule of thumb monthly expense line item that wraps everything up (rent, taxes, the cost of doing business, marketing spend, etc)