If you run a seasonal operation in hospitality, landscaping, construction, or food processing, you’ve probably had this thought:
“H-2B is expensive and complicated. Temp agencies are flexible. We’ll just pay more per hour and be done.”
On paper, that logic is tempting. Temp agencies quote a single hourly rate. H-2B shows up as a stack of legal fees, government forms, housing, transportation, and compliance tasks.
But over the life of your seasonal business, hourly rate vs. hourly rate is the wrong comparison. The real math includes:
- No-shows and last-minute cancellations
- Constant retraining and quality problems
- Refunds, bad reviews, and lost repeat business
- The cost of unserved demand when you’re understaffed
This article walks through a season-long and 3-year cost comparison between a temp-only model and an H-2B-enabled model, using realistic ranges and public data (not guarantees). By the end, you’ll know when “H-2B vs temp agency” is mostly noise—and when H-2B genuinely wins on cost, reliability, and growth capacity.
Why Your Seasonal Labor Decisions Are Based on Incomplete Math
The seductive simplicity of temp agency hourly rates
Temp agencies sell you one number:
“We can get you workers at $X per hour.”
All the complexity—sourcing, vetting, transportation, last-minute replacements—is “baked in” to that rate. It feels plug-and-play.
But that hourly quote doesn’t show you:
- How often workers don’t show up or quit mid-season
- How much supervisor time you burn retraining new faces
- The quality hits from workers who see your job as a one-week stopgap
- The revenue you never see because you simply don’t have the bodies to open all the rooms, run all the lines, or take all the contracts
In tight labor markets, hospitality and similar sectors have been carrying hundreds of thousands of open positions, with industry sources noting over 1 million open roles and widespread staffing gaps even as wages rise. Temp agencies can help, but they don’t change the underlying shortage.
The costs you never see on an invoice: no-shows, retraining, complaints
The bill you pay a temp agency rarely itemizes:
- No-show days and last-minute cancellations
- Repeat training time for supervisors and lead workers
- Refunds, comps, and discounts when service falls over
- Bad reviews and lost repeat business
Those costs sit in other parts of your P&L:
- Overtime and manager hours in payroll
- Marketing and “customer recovery” costs
- Lower average ticket size because you can’t run full capacity
When you compare H-2B vs temp agencies only on hourly wage, you’re comparing invoices, not outcomes.
How H-2B’s upfront costs distort your first impression
By comparison, the H-2B program puts its costs front and center:
- Legal and consulting fees
- Government filing fees
- Required prevailing wage based on DOL determinations
- Housing and transportation (in many models)
USCIS and the Department of Labor describe H-2B as a program for temporary non-agricultural labor, where employers must prove a seasonal, peakload, intermittent, or one-time need and request a prevailing wage before recruiting.
So H-2B feels expensive and bureaucratic up front—even if, over the life of your business, it actually stabilizes staffing and lowers total cost per productive hour.
Building a Season-Long Cost Comparison Model
Understanding H-2B vs Temp Agency: Key Considerations
To evaluate H-2B vs temp agencies, build a simple season model with four buckets:
- Direct costs
- Indirect costs
- Unserved demand
- Risk and volatility
Direct costs: wages, agency markups, H-2B legal and government fees
For temp agencies, direct costs include:
- Hourly wage you agree to
- Agency markup (sometimes 30–60%+ depending on market and role)
- Any conversion or buyout fees if you want to hire someone full-time
For H-2B, direct costs include:
- Prevailing wage (you request this from DOL’s National Prevailing Wage Center)
- Legal and consulting fees to prepare the ETA applications and USCIS petition
- USCIS filing fees and possible fraud prevention fees
- Travel and (often) housing/transportation allowances
The DOL and USCIS emphasize that H-2B is meant to fill temporary labor shortages where employers can’t find enough U.S. workers, not to depress local wages.
On a pure cash basis, H-2B generally looks like higher upfront fixed cost and a lower variable cost per reliably staffed hour, while temp agencies look like no obvious fixed cost but a higher variable cost per hour plus hidden risk.
Indirect costs: turnover, quality, refunds, lost repeat business
Indirect costs are often where temp-heavy models get crushed:
- Turnover mid-season – constant churn leads to basic errors and customer complaints.
- Quality issues – workers unfamiliar with your brand standards can hurt review scores and contract renewal rates.
- Supervisor burnout – constant training and correction prevent supervisors from focusing on improvement.
By contrast, the H-2B program is built to allow returning workers season after season, subject to caps and rules, which dramatically reduces ramp-up and training cost over time.
One study of H-2B usage in turf and landscaping operations found that seasonal guest workers helped employers address peak labor shortages more efficiently and supported full-time U.S. staff by reducing overload during busy periods.
Modeling unserved demand when you don’t have enough staff
The missing piece in most comparisons is unserved demand:
- Rooms you leave unsold because you lack housekeepers
- Landscaping contracts you decline
- Tables you can’t open in your restaurant
- Processing lines you can’t run to full capacity
Hospitality and tourism have reported hundreds of thousands of open roles, with industry associations arguing that expanding legal seasonal visas like H-2B is critical to filling them.
In your cost model, estimate:
- Revenue you could generate at full staffing
- Revenue you actually generate with your current model
- Gross margin on that gap
Even conservative assumptions often show that missing demand is more costly than H-2B legal + program costs combined.
Secondary CTA placement:
At the end of this section, place:
Download the H-2B vs Temp Cost Calculator
Plug in your own wage, markup, turnover, and demand numbers to see how your seasonal cost curve changes.
Three-Year Scenario: Temp-Only vs H-2B-Enabled Staffing
Now zoom out to three seasons, comparing two similar businesses:
- Company A – Temp-Only: Relies heavily on local temp agencies each season.
- Company B – H-2B-Enabled: Uses H-2B for core recurring roles and temp agencies for edge cases.
All numbers are illustrative, not promises. Use your own actuals in your calculator.
Year 1: Higher friction and “learning curve” with H-2B
In year one, Company B feels the pain of:
- Learning the H-2B timeline, recruitment rules, and documentation requirements from USCIS and DOL.
- Setting up housing, transportation, and new onboarding flows.
- Legal and consulting fees that are highly visible in the budget.
Company A, meanwhile, simply calls the temp agency again, pays the hourly rate, and absorbs another season of:
- No-shows and high churn
- Spiky overtime and supervisor burnout
- Occasional bad reviews and comped services
On paper, Year 1 can look more expensive for Company B because those H-2B setup costs are upfront and obvious, while Company A’s pain is scattered and partially hidden.
Year 2: Retention, returning workers, and smoother ramp-up
In Year 2, Company B starts to feel the H-2B “flywheel”:
- A portion of the previous year’s H-2B workers return, already trained and familiar with your systems (subject to cap availability and rules).
- Supervisors spend less time on basic training and more time on quality and upsell.
- Customer experience stabilizes; refunds and negative reviews drop.
Research cited by industry groups like the American Hotel and Lodging Association notes that H-2B programs can help businesses address seasonal labor shortages efficiently, benefiting full-year U.S. workers who are less overloaded in peak seasons.
Company A’s reality hasn’t changed much:
- Similar or higher agency rates
- Similar or higher churn
- Another season of saying “no” to demand on the busiest weekends
Year 3: Brand stability and capacity to grow peak seasons
By Year 3, if Company B has stayed consistent with H-2B:
- Supervisors and managers treat seasonal ramp-up as a planned, repeatable process.
- Returning workers form a core seasonal team that protects brand standards and trains new arrivals.
- The business feels confident accepting more group bookings, contracts, or seasonal projects because capacity is predictable.
Economic analyses of H-2B suggest that, when properly regulated, these programs can address serious seasonal labor shortages and support broader employment—although think tanks disagree on details and wage impacts.
Company A has likely gone through three more cycles of scrambling, overpaying for last-minute labor, and turning away high-margin business—without capturing that loss anywhere but in “missed opportunity.”
Primary CTA placement:
Right after this scenario section:
Request a Seasonal Staffing ROI Review
Share one or two recent seasons’ numbers (agency spend, overtime, no-show issues, lost business), and we’ll help you model realistic H-2B vs temp scenarios to take to your finance team.
Contrarian POV: Temp Agencies Are Not Actually “Risk-Free”
Legal and reputational risks of poorly vetted workers
Temp staffing feels like you’ve outsourced risk—but regulators don’t always see it that way. If temp workers:
- Violate wage and hour laws
- Create harassment or safety problems
- Handle guest information or company assets poorly
…the reputational and regulatory fallout lands squarely on your brand.
H-2B employers are subject to specific compliance rules, including prevailing wage, record-keeping, and worker protections, with enforcement from DOL and other agencies. That oversight raises your compliance burden—but also forces structure and documentation that temp-heavy models often lack.
The risk of last-minute cancellations and under-filled seasons
Temp agencies juggle multiple clients. In a tight labor market, they may:
- Struggle to fill your entire order
- Reassign workers to a higher-paying client
- Deliver workers late or in waves
Recent reporting shows employers in seasonal industries repeatedly hitting H-2B caps and scrambling for workers—proof that the broader labor shortage is real. Temp agencies do not create new workers; they just reshuffle the ones who are already there.
How over-reliance on temp agencies erodes your employer brand
If your frontline teams see a revolving door of agency workers who leave after a few shifts, they may conclude that:
- Your company is not committed to building a real team
- Seasonal work is chaos by design
- Management will always “throw bodies” at problems instead of planning capacity
Over time, that perception can hurt your local recruiting, making H-2B—or any stable model—harder to implement.
Decision Point: When Does H-2B Make More Sense Than Temps?
Thresholds: season length, recurring demand, skill level
H-2B makes the most sense when:
- Your season is long enough (often 8–9+ weeks) to justify the upfront cost
- Demand is predictable and recurring from year to year
- Roles require training and brand standards, not just generic labor
The H-2B category list covers many non-agricultural seasonal roles, including landscaping, hospitality, construction, seafood processing, forestry, amusement and recreation, and more.
Industries and markets where H-2B is structurally stronger
H-2B tends to be structurally strong when:
- You’re in a destination market (beach, ski, resort, tourist hub) where local labor is limited and seasonal demand spikes.
- Your business is in a sector that already uses H-2B heavily, such as landscaping (which accounts for a large share of certified H-2B positions), certain hospitality segments, and recreation.
- You need consistency: the same roles, same training, same standards every season.
Policy-focused groups like the Economic Policy Institute highlight real concerns about wage suppression and worker protections in H-2B. Those critiques are part of your risk assessment—but they don’t erase the reality that many employers in these sectors simply can’t meet demand without structured seasonal programs.
Situations where temp agencies are still the smarter choice
Temp agencies may still make more sense when:
- Your labor need is truly sporadic (e.g., a one-week festival, irregular events).
- You are testing a new line of business and don’t know if the demand will repeat.
- You need a wide variety of short-term roles where training cost is minimal.
The point of this article is not “H-2B always wins.” It’s: stop comparing them only on hourly rate.
Implementation Steps for Transitioning from Temp-Heavy to H-2B-Enabled
Running a pilot season without burning bridges with your agency
A practical sequence:
- Identify one or two core roles (e.g., housekeepers, line operators, landscape crews) where churn is hurting you most.
- Run an H-2B pilot for those roles while still using your temp agency for overflow.
- Track: no-shows, overtime, guest/quality metrics, and total cost per productive hour for each group.
You don’t have to cancel your agency relationship on day one; you’re simply building a second, more stable leg under your seasonal staffing strategy.
Aligning housing, transport, and onboarding with a new model
H-2B adds operational pieces: housing, transport, document checks. U.S. consular info for H-2 visas emphasizes that workers may serve in construction, hospitality, forestry, and other sectors, often coming from Mexico and other designated countries.
Use the pilot year to:
- Secure appropriate housing and transportation
- Standardize onboarding and safety training
- Integrate H-2B arrivals into your existing teams intentionally
Tracking the right KPIs from day one (beyond wage cost)
For a fair comparison, track per season and per role:
- Total wage + markup/fees
- No-shows and mid-season exits
- Overtime hours by department
- Guest complaints, refunds, or quality metrics
- Revenue capacity (rooms/lines/contracts you could vs did run)
Those KPIs let you build a credible “before vs after” story that finance and leadership can trust.
Common Mistakes in H-2B vs Temp Calculations
Counting legal fees but not the value of returning H-2B workers
Many first-time users treat H-2B as a one-year experiment and focus only on:
“We paid $X in legal and filing fees.”
They miss the compounding benefit of returning workers, who cut ramp-up time, reduce errors, and support full-time staff more effectively—benefits highlighted in industry and sector studies of repeat H-2B usage.
Ignoring how worker experience affects rehire rates and quality
Your model should consider worker experience on both sides:
- If temp workers feel disposable, rehire rates and performance stay low.
- If H-2B workers are treated as partners—decent housing, predictable schedules—you increase return rates and quality over time.
Treating policy headlines as predictions instead of variables
Policy risk is real:
- H-2B is subject to a statutory cap and supplemental visa rules, which USCIS updates regularly.
- Congress and agencies debate changes to wages, caps, and worker protections.
Treat those factors as variables in your scenario planning, not as a reason to avoid H-2B altogether.
Transformation: From Survival Hiring to Predictable Seasonal Capacity
The business you can accept when seasonal capacity is stable
Once you have a predictable seasonal workforce, you can:
- Accept more group bookings and high-margin contracts
- Extend your season or add shoulder-season products
- Invest in training that lifts check size, average ticket, or upsell rates
How workforce predictability changes your pricing and sales strategy
Stable staffing lets you:
- Commit to service levels confidently
- Avoid “panic pricing” discounts just to keep volume up when service is shaky
- Use advance sales and packages more aggressively, knowing you can deliver
Building a multi-year plan instead of scrambling every spring
Ultimately, H-2B vs temp agency is not just a sourcing question; it’s a strategy question:
- Do you want to rebuild your workforce every year from scratch?
- Or build a multi-year seasonal team that grows with your brand?
If you’re ready to run the numbers instead of guessing:
Request a Seasonal Staffing ROI Review
Share your last 1–3 seasons’ staffing patterns, agency spend, and demand profile. We’ll help you model realistic H-2B vs temp scenarios you can take straight to your finance and leadership teams.
Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. H-2B program eligibility, costs, and outcomes depend on specific facts and evolving regulations. Employers should consult qualified immigration counsel and HR/finance advisors before making decisions about seasonal visa use or staffing models.
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H-2B Temporary Non-agricultural Program | U.S. Department of Labor (ETA)
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Temporary Worker Visas (H-2A/H-2B Overview) | U.S. Department of State – Travel.gov
