What employee turnover costs you

Losing one $60,000 employee costs about $24,577 once the open seat, the hire, and the replacement's first months are added together, and three departures a year come to $73,731. That is close to 41 percent of a single year of that person's pay, and almost none of it ever appears as a line item in a budget.

Three parts, each one you can check

Turnover is not one bill. It is three, they arrive at different times, and only one of them ever generates an invoice.

The first is the open seat. While a role is unfilled, the work it exists to do either waits or lands on somebody else's week. This page prices those weeks at what the role costs when it is filled, on the reasoning that a job is worth at least what a business agreed to pay for it. A $60,000 role on the loaded basis runs $1,673 a week, so six weeks with nobody in the chair is $10,038.

The second is the hire: job board spend, an agency fee if you use one, screening, background checks, and the hours your own people give up to read applications and sit in interviews. It is the one part of turnover most companies already measure, which is why it is a field on this page rather than a formula. Put in what your last search actually cost, including the interview time.

The third is ramp. A replacement draws full pay from the first week and does not do the full job from the first week. Set how many weeks it takes them to get there, and roughly what share of the job they cover on average along the way. Twelve weeks at half output is six weeks of pay buying nothing, which at this salary is another $10,038, the same size as the vacancy.

Where the weekly figure comes from

All three parts are priced off one number: annual salary times the cost basis, divided by 52. The loaded basis multiplies pay by 1.45 first, this site's standing convention for the gap between wages and what an employer actually spends on a worker, drawn from the March 2026 employer cost figures published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Base salary is the other option and ignores that gap entirely. Reach for loaded when you are arguing for a retention budget, because what a resignation burns is employer money rather than take-home pay.

Three departures, worked out

An hourly role at $38,000 filled in three weeks, $1,200 spent hiring, four weeks to full output at 60 percent along the way, costs $6,074 each time somebody leaves. Twenty of those in a year is $121,485. That is the shape of turnover in a warehouse or a support queue: modest per person and large in total.

A $165,000 engineer is the reverse. Fourteen weeks to find one, $25,000 spent finding them, and six months before the new hire carries the same load, averaging 40 percent of it in the meantime. One departure costs $161,188, which is 98 percent of a year of that salary for a single resignation. Two of them in a year is $322,377.

A $95,000 manager priced on base salary alone, eight weeks open, $12,000 to hire, sixteen weeks to full output at 55 percent, costs $39,769. Notice what the basis did there. Moving that one control from loaded to base cuts the weekly figure by 31 percent and takes about $12,500 off the answer, which is more than an extra month of vacancy would have added.

What this figure leaves out

Nothing here prices the knowledge that walks out with the person, the customer relationships a departing salesperson takes along, the effect on the people who stay and now cover extra work, or severance if any was paid. It also leaves out the upside, because a departure is sometimes how a stuck team gets unstuck and the replacement turns out better than the person who left. Treat the result as a floor for the money side of one exit, which is the number a retention conversation is usually missing.

Common mistakes

1. Counting the hiring cost and stopping there. It is the smallest of the three parts in almost every scenario on this page, and it is the only one most companies track.
2. Setting weeks to full output from the job description rather than from the last person actually hired into the role. Ask the manager how long it really took.
3. Pricing a departure at base salary while comparing it against a retention spend quoted in employer money, such as a raise plus the payroll tax that rides on it.
4. Reading the yearly figure as a company-wide total. It answers what one kind of role costs at that rate of departure, so run it once per pay band and add the results.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts separations every month in its Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, so the rate for your industry is public even when the price of yours is not. For the small daily version of the same waste, a group of salaries sitting in one room, the meeting meter on the home page counts it upward while it happens.