Cost of a bad hire calculator
Most people quote an industry statistic. This works out your number, for your role, in about thirty seconds.
A bad hire costs far more than the salary paid. The full cost includes recruitment spend, salary and employer costs for the time they were there, the management time absorbed, lost productivity while the role underperformed, and the cost of running the hire again. For a mid-level role this commonly totals well over a year of salary.
Everything is calculated in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored.
How the calculation works
Five components, each of which is a real cost you have actually incurred:
- Salary and on-costs — what you paid them for the months they were there, including employer taxes, benefits and equipment.
- Lost productivity — the gap between what a good hire would have delivered and what you got. If they delivered 40% of the value, 60% of their cost bought nothing.
- Management time — the share of their manager's salary absorbed by managing the problem. This is consistently the most under-counted item.
- Recruitment, twice — you paid to hire them, and you are paying again to replace them.
- Vacancy cost — the role sits unfilled or underfilled while you re-run the process.
What this does not include
Deliberately, because they are real but hard to quantify honestly: the effect on colleagues who absorbed the gap, the customers or projects affected, the opportunity cost of what the team could have done otherwise, and the morale cost of a visible mis-hire. Your true number is higher than this calculator shows.
What to do with the number
The point is not the number itself. It is the comparison: set it against what you currently spend on making hiring decisions well. Most companies discover they spend more on a single mis-hire than on several years of hiring tooling and interviewer training combined — which usually reframes the question of whether structured interviewing is worth the effort.
Common questions
What is a typical cost of a bad hire?
Estimates vary widely — commonly quoted figures range from 30% of salary to several times it. The range is so wide because it depends heavily on seniority, tenure before exit, and how much management time was absorbed. That is exactly why calculating your own number is more useful than citing an average.
Should I include recruitment cost twice?
Yes. You paid to hire the person who did not work out, and you are paying again to replace them. Both are real cash costs caused by the same mis-hire.
Is my data stored?
No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser and nothing is transmitted or saved.