Employee Turnover Cost Calculator
Estimate what employee turnover costs your company each year — and what you'd save by reducing it. Enter your team size, average salary, and turnover rate; adjust the replacement-cost assumption to match your mix of roles.
Don't know it? Use our turnover rate calculator first.
Published estimates commonly range from roughly one-third of salary for entry-level roles to well over 100% for senior and specialized roles. 50% is a conservative middle for a mixed team.
Estimated departures per year
15
Estimated cost per departure
$35,000
Estimated annual cost of turnover
$525,000
Potential annual savings
$105,000
if turnover drops by 3 percentage points
How this calculator works
The math is deliberately simple and transparent:
Annual cost of turnover = (employees × annual turnover rate) × (average salary × replacement-cost %)
The first bracket is your expected number of departures per year. The second is the fully loaded cost of each departure: recruiting, onboarding, the vacancy period, the months a replacement takes to reach full productivity, and the manager and teammate time burned along the way. Rather than pretending we know your exact cost, the calculator exposes it as a percentage of salary you control — published estimates commonly range from roughly a third of salary for entry-level roles to one or two times salary for senior and specialized ones.
Why the "what if" slider matters most
The total is what gets attention, but the savings line is what gets budget. Almost no retention initiative needs to eliminate turnover to pay for itself — it needs to prevent a handful of regretted departures. A single percentage point of turnover on a 200-person team at average salaries is a six-figure line item, which is why the business case for acting early on flight risk is usually easy to make once the number is written down. For the full breakdown of where the money goes, see our guide to the real cost of employee turnover.
Getting your inputs right
- Turnover rate: use your trailing-12-month figure if you have it. If you only have monthly numbers, our turnover & retention rate calculator annualizes them for you.
- Average salary: use the average for the population you're modeling. Running the calculator separately for engineering, sales, and support usually tells a sharper story than one blended number.
- Replacement cost: start at 50% for a mixed team, then re-run at your best and worst case and present the range — a range is more credible than false precision.
Frequently asked questions
- How do you calculate the cost of employee turnover?
- Multiply the number of departures per year (employees × annual turnover rate) by the estimated cost per departure (average salary × a replacement-cost percentage). The replacement-cost percentage bundles recruiting, onboarding, ramp-up time, and lost productivity into one number — commonly estimated between roughly one-third and two times annual salary depending on the role's seniority.
- What percentage of salary does it cost to replace an employee?
- Published estimates vary widely by role. Entry-level and high-turnover roles tend to sit near the lower end (roughly a third to half of annual salary), while senior, technical, and leadership roles can reach one to two times salary once you count recruiting fees, lost institutional knowledge, and the months it takes a replacement to reach full productivity. This calculator lets you set the percentage so you can model your own mix.
- What costs are included in the cost of a departure?
- Direct costs include recruiting, agency or advertising fees, interviewing time, and onboarding. Indirect costs — usually the larger share — include the vacancy period, ramp-up time for the replacement, manager and teammate time spent covering the gap, lost customer relationships, and the drag on team morale that often follows a regretted exit.
- Is this calculator's estimate exact?
- No — it's a defensible order-of-magnitude estimate, which is what most retention business cases need. The biggest sensitivity is the replacement-cost percentage, so we recommend running it at a conservative and an aggressive setting and presenting the range.
- How can we reduce the cost of turnover?
- The highest-leverage move is reducing regretted departures — losses of people you wanted to keep. That means spotting flight risk early enough to act: watching leading indicators, running stay interviews, and fixing the manager- and growth-related drivers that push good people out. Even a one- or two-point drop in turnover usually outweighs the cost of any retention program.
Turnover is cheaper to prevent than to calculate.
TeamPredict flags resignation risk early from public LinkedIn signals — giving you lead time to retain your best people before they hand in notice.
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