HR tools
What is employee turnover costing you?
Set your headcount, average salary, and attrition rate. The yearly bill updates as you drag, benchmarked on conservative replacement-cost research. No signup, nothing gated.
Where these numbers come from
Yearly bill = (headcount × attrition rate) × (33% × average salary)
- The 33 percent
- The conservative end of SHRM's replacement-cost research, which puts the cost of replacing an employee at 30 to 50 percent of their annual salary. Senior, technical, and customer-facing roles routinely exceed it.
- What it covers
- Recruiting and agency fees, hiring-manager time, onboarding, ramp time before full productivity, and the output lost while the seat is empty.
- What it leaves out
- Knowledge walking out the door, customer relationships, and the drag on the colleagues who absorb the work. The real bill is higher than this number.
- Leavers
- Headcount times attrition rate, rounded to whole people. If you know your actual leaver count, set the attrition slider until the leaver row matches.
Benchmark context comes from CultureMonkey's dataset of 10M+ anonymized survey responses across 8 industries. See how engagement, the strongest attrition predictor, varies by sector in the engagement benchmarks by industry.
What happens when you act on the number
71%fewer actively disengagedRobertshawManufacturing, 2,300 employees. Cut active disengagement 71 percent and lifted engagement from 7.5 to 8.7 by acting on survey drivers.+10%above industry benchmarkUnited Bank2,000+ employees in finance. 80 percent participation and engagement 10 points above the financial-industry benchmark.Questions people ask
How much does employee turnover cost?
A conservative estimate is 33 percent of the leaving employee's annual salary, covering recruiting, onboarding, and lost productivity. For a 200-person company with 15 percent attrition and a $60,000 average salary, that is roughly $594,000 per year.
How do you calculate the cost of turnover?
Multiply your number of leavers per year by the replacement cost per leaver. Leavers equal headcount times attrition rate. Replacement cost is typically 33 to 50 percent of annual salary; this calculator uses the conservative 33 percent.
What is a good employee turnover rate?
There is no universal good number. Voluntary turnover around 10 to 15 percent is common across industries, while hospitality and retail routinely run far higher and utilities or government run lower. The trend matters more than the average: rising turnover in one team, role, or tenure band is a warning even when the company-wide number looks fine.
What is the difference between turnover and attrition?
Turnover usually means every departure that has to be backfilled, voluntary or involuntary. Attrition often refers to departures where the seat is intentionally left empty. For cost purposes this calculator treats them the same: a person left, and replacing their output costs money.
Why does replacing senior employees cost more?
Replacement cost scales with scarcity and ramp time. For executives and specialized technical roles, commonly cited estimates reach one to two times annual salary once search fees, long vacancies, and a successor's learning curve are counted. The 33 percent used here is deliberately the conservative floor.
What costs of turnover does this calculator leave out?
Institutional knowledge, customer relationships that walk out with the leaver, the extra load on colleagues who absorb the work, and the hiring drag on managers. All of them are real and none of them are in the formula, which means the true bill is higher than the number on this page.
Can employee engagement surveys predict turnover?
Disengagement is measurable months before a resignation letter. Falling survey participation, dropping manager-trust scores, and silence in open-text answers are leading indicators. Robertshaw, a 2,300-employee manufacturer, cut actively disengaged employees by 71 percent after acting on exactly those signals.
How can I reduce employee turnover?
Measure why people are disengaging before they resign. Anonymous pulse surveys surface attrition drivers early, so managers can act while employees are still persuadable. Acting visibly on the top two drivers matters more than measuring twenty of them.