Cost of a Bad Hire Calculator

How this calculator works

A bad hire is expensive in ways that don't show up on a single invoice, so this tool assembles the cost from parts you can actually estimate rather than asking you to trust one headline multiple. The math is a transparent sum:

Total = lost productivity during tenure + recruiting & agency + onboarding & training + manager & team time + severance & exit + re-hiring the replacement

The one derived line is lost productivity. The calculator takes the salary you paid over the months the person stayed (annual salary times months divided by twelve), then multiplies it by the share of that pay that never turned into useful output. That share is yours to set. Setting it to 100% treats the entire salary as wasted; setting it lower credits the partial work a struggling hire still delivered. Modeling the wasted share rather than the whole salary matters, because you would have paid someone to do the job - the cost of the mistake is the gap between what you spent and what you got back, not the paycheck itself.

Why the total is usually bigger than people expect

When managers guess at the cost of a mis-hire, they tend to picture the agency fee and stop there. The direct costs are the small part. The larger, quieter costs are the months of reduced output, the manager hours spent coaching and correcting instead of building, the teammates who absorbed the slack, and then the second search to fix the first one. Widely cited estimates put the total anywhere from a few months of pay to well beyond a full year's salary, and the range is that wide for a simple reason: it depends heavily on the role, the seniority, and how long the problem ran before it was addressed. Rather than adopt any one of those figures, this calculator lets you build the number from your own inputs so you can defend every line. For the broader picture of where turnover money goes, see our guide to the real cost of employee turnover.

Getting your inputs right

• Lost productivity: this is the input with the most leverage, so treat it carefully. A hire who was actively disruptive might sit near 100%; one who was simply a slow ramp that never arrived might be lower. Run a conservative and an aggressive figure and keep the range.
• Manager & team time: value the hours at loaded rates - salary plus benefits and overhead - not base pay alone, and remember to include the time spent hiring the person in the first place and managing them out at the end.
• Re-hiring cost: a bad hire usually means paying the full search cost twice. If the replacement search is still ahead of you, our turnover cost calculator can help you frame the replacement side.

From counting the cost to preventing it

This calculator measures a mistake after it happened, which is useful for a budget conversation but does nothing for the next hire. The more durable win is a hiring and retention process that reduces how often you carry this cost at all: sharper role definition and structured interviews so fewer mis-hires get through, honest onboarding and early check-ins so a struggling hire is caught in weeks rather than quarters, and enough lead time on flight risk that you replace a departing star from a position of strength instead of a panic. TeamPredict sits on that last part, reading public LinkedIn signals to flag resignation risk early - the difference between a planned, well-run backfill and a rushed one that becomes the next bad hire you have to price out here.