Employee Turnover Cost Calculator
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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.
Gallup estimates replacing an employee costs one-half to two times their annual salary, with frontline roles at the low end and leaders and specialized roles at the high end. 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. Gallup's widely cited estimate puts the cost of replacing an employee at one-half to two times their annual salary (and calls that conservative), with frontline roles at the low end and leaders and specialized roles at the high end.
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 300-person team at a $70,000 average salary and a 50% replacement cost is roughly a $105,000 line item (300 × 1% × $35,000, inputs you can reproduce in the calculator above), 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.
Methodology & sources
The formula this calculator uses is shown in full above, and every assumption is an input you control. There are no hidden industry presets. All math runs in your browser; nothing you enter is stored or sent to a server. For the reasoning behind the formula and its edge cases, see:
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<p>Calculator by <a href="https://www.teampredict.ai/tools/employee-turnover-cost-calculator">TeamPredict</a></p>Frequently asked questions
- How does this calculator estimate the cost of turnover?
- It multiplies your expected departures per year (employees × annual turnover rate) by an estimated cost per departure (average salary × a replacement-cost percentage you control). The replacement-cost percentage bundles recruiting, onboarding, ramp-up time, and lost productivity into one adjustable number instead of asking you for ten inputs you don't have.
- What replacement-cost percentage should I set?
- Start at 50% for a mixed team. Slide it down toward the lower end for entry-level and high-turnover roles, and up toward one to two times salary for senior, technical, and leadership roles, where recruiting fees, lost institutional knowledge, and long ramp-up dominate. Then re-run at a conservative and an aggressive setting and present the range. It's more credible than one precise-looking number.
- What does the replacement-cost percentage bundle together?
- Direct costs: recruiting, agency or advertising fees, interviewing time, and onboarding. Indirect costs (usually the larger share): 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.
- Should I use one blended average salary or model teams separately?
- Run role groups separately when you can. Engineering, sales, and support usually have different salaries, different turnover rates, and different replacement costs, so one blended run hides where the money is actually going. Three quick runs of this calculator tell a sharper story to a CFO than one averaged number.
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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