Free tool
Cost of vacancy calculator
Every other calculator on this site prices a hire. This one prices the decision you make before that: what the empty seat is costing you while you think about it. It nets the loaded payroll you are not paying against the output you are losing, which is why the number it produces is smaller than the ones you have seen elsewhere and easier to defend when someone asks where it came from.
Net cost per working day
$68
$341 per five-day week at this setting.
Already spent
$1,459
Sunk. It is in the past and no hiring decision can recover it.
Still ahead of you
$1,897
This is the only part of the number your next decision can change.
Every week off the search
$340
Total across the whole vacancy: $3,355 over 69 calendar days.
| Line | Per working day | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| Value of the seat | $500.00 | $130,000 of gross margin per employee per year, divided by 260 working days, times the 1x weighting for this seat. |
| Output actually lost | $225.00 | The 45% of the seat's work nobody is picking up. The absorbed 55% is not lost, it is displaced, and its cost belongs in the line below. |
| Coverage you are buying | $300.00 | Overtime, contractors, agency temps, or a partner backfill. Cash out the door, not an estimate. |
| Cost of the delay itself | $0.00 | Slipped launch revenue, service level penalties, or churn you can evidence. Left at zero unless you can defend a figure. |
| Loaded salary not paid | -$456.73 | $118,750 a year of base plus 25% load, divided by 260. Payroll stops when the seat empties. Most vacancy calculators skip this and overstate the answer badly. |
| Net | $68.27 | Multiplied by 49.2 working days, which is what 69 calendar days comes to at 260 working days a year. |
| Search | Calendar days | Vacancy cost | What it assumes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shortlist in hand | 21 | $1,021 | A search that starts at the interview because someone else has already done the sourcing. |
| Market median | 39 | $1,897 | SHRM's 2026 median time to fill for nonexecutive roles, requisition open to offer accepted. |
| Senior or specialist | 60 | $2,918 | A deeper pool problem, a panel, and a budget approval that has to be re-confirmed. |
| Stalled search | 90 | $4,377 | Reopened once, a rejected offer, or a role nobody owns full time. More common than it should be. |
Typical seat: An average seat for this business. Contributes roughly what the headcount average suggests, no more and no less.
The gap between a 21-day search and the 39-day market median is $875 on these inputs. That gap is the whole business case for doing anything differently about sourcing, and it is worth more than the fee on most searches.
The days this tool prices are mostly sourcing days, and sourcing is the stage you can hand over without giving up a single decision. Send us the role brief and Hire Nile shares vetted Egyptian candidates with real rates, so the clock you are paying for starts at the interview instead of at the search.
Every figure here is produced from numbers you entered. Nothing is a benchmark for your business, a quote, or a promise about how quickly any particular role can be filled. Working days convert from calendar days at 260 working days a year. The currency selector changes the symbol only and applies no exchange rate, so enter salary and revenue in the same currency. This tool is informational and is not accounting, legal, or tax advice.
Why most vacancy numbers are too big to use
The standard formula is twenty years old, and the two things it leaves out both push the answer in the same direction.
The method almost every cost of vacancy calculator uses traces back to a single article: Dr. John Sullivan's cost of vacancy formulas, published on ERE on July 24, 2005. Take company revenue, divide by headcount, divide by working days in the year, multiply by days open, and apply a job level multiplier of one to three. Sullivan was writing to give recruiting leaders a defensible way to argue for budget, and for that purpose the formula does its job. It is genuinely useful and this tool is built on the same bones.
The problem is what happens when that formula is put behind a web form and pointed at a founder. Sullivan cited daily vacancy costs between $7,000 and $12,000, and one case at $200,000 a day. Those were deliberately chosen extreme examples of critical roles in time-sensitive businesses. Reproduced as a default in a calculator, they turn into an implied claim about your open support role, and the number that comes out the other end is large enough that most people quietly stop believing it.
Two specific corrections bring it back to something you can put in a board pack. The first is margin instead of revenue. An employee at a business running a 65 percent gross margin is not carrying their share of the top line out of the door when they leave. They are carrying their share of what is left after cost of delivery, because the delivery cost of the work they are not doing also stops. Using revenue overstates the seat by the whole of your cost of goods.
The second correction is larger and almost universally omitted. You are not paying the empty seat. Loaded payroll leaves your cost base the day the resignation takes effect and does not come back until a replacement signs. On a salary of 95,000 with a 25 percent employer load, that is roughly 457 a working day flowing back to you for every day the search runs. A vacancy calculator that counts only the loss is showing you one column of a two-column ledger.
The four channels, and which ones you can actually evidence
The calculator separates the cost into four lines rather than one, because they have very different levels of evidence behind them and a CFO will ask about exactly that.
Lost output is the seat's value multiplied by the share of its work that nobody is picking up. Note the second half of that sentence. If your team is absorbing 55 percent of the work, then 55 percent of the output is not lost, it is displaced, and counting it as lost is double counting against the coverage line. This is the single most common error in vacancy estimates that get challenged and withdrawn.
Coverage is cash you can point at on a bank statement: overtime paid, a contractor day rate, an agency temp, a partner backfill. It is the strongest line in the model precisely because it is the least theoretical. If you are covering an absence entirely by asking salaried people to work longer for the same money, the honest entry here is zero, and the cost is real but it is showing up as attrition risk rather than as spend. Enter it as zero and say so.
Delay cost defaults to zero and should usually stay there. It is for dated consequences you can evidence: revenue from a launch that has slipped a known number of weeks, a contractual service level penalty, a churn figure with a cohort behind it. Anything softer than that is a guess, and a guess in this line is what gets the whole number dismissed.
Payroll not paid is the negative line, and it is the most certain figure on the page. You know it exactly. It is in your payroll system.
How the seat weighting works
One company-wide average cannot price a quota-carrying seat and a queue-clearing seat at the same time.
| Weighting | Multiplier | When it fits |
|---|---|---|
| Supporting | 0.6x | Work that keeps the business running but is not on the critical path. Queues get longer when the seat is empty, and nothing stops. |
| Typical | 1x | An average seat for this business. Contributes roughly what the headcount average suggests, no more and no less. |
| Critical | 2x | Revenue-facing or on the critical path of something dated. A launch, a pipeline, a contractual service level. The hole is visible outside the team. |
| Sole owner | 3x | The only person who can do a thing the business depends on. Work does not queue behind this seat, it stops behind it. Rare, and if you picked it, check that it is really true. |
The sole owner weighting is the one to be suspicious of. If a seat genuinely stops work rather than queuing it, the vacancy cost is the smaller of your two problems, and the finding belongs in a risk conversation about single points of failure rather than in a hiring business case.
What the benchmarks say about how long you will be paying this
The days input is where most of the answer lives, so it is worth using a real number rather than an optimistic one. SHRM's 2026 recruiting benchmarking data brief, built from 4,657 SHRM member responses collected between November 24, 2025 and January 23, 2026, reports a median time to fill of 39 calendar days for nonexecutive positions and 45 days for executive positions. SHRM defines it precisely: the number of days from the requisition opening to the offer being accepted, counted in calendar days including weekends and holidays.
Read that definition twice, because it ends earlier than most people assume. Offer acceptance is the moment your candidate tells their current employer they are leaving. It is not the moment they start. The notice period sits entirely outside the 39 days and is frequently the larger block, which is why the hiring timeline planner keeps the two clocks visibly separate. For a vacancy cost, the seat is empty for both of them. If you want the full picture, set the days input to the search plus the notice, not the search alone.
The wider market gives you the context for whether 39 days is achievable right now. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS release published on August 4, 2026 put job openings at 7.4 million in June 2026, a rate of 4.4 percent, against 5.3 million hires and 5.4 million separations in the same month. Separations running slightly ahead of hires is the statistical shape of a market where the seat you are filling is being vacated somewhere else at about the rate it is being filled.
When the honest answer is that the vacancy is cheap
A model that can only ever tell you to hire faster is not a model.
Set a supporting seat, a high absorbed share, and no coverage spend, and this calculator will tell you the vacancy is saving you money. That result is not a defect. It is the most useful thing the tool does, and it is the reason the salary line is in there.
When you get it, there are three readings and they lead to different places. The first is that the work genuinely is being absorbed at no extra cost, in which case the question is not how fast to fill the role but whether to fill it at all. Rewriting the role or splitting it may be the better outcome, and the vacancy has given you evidence you would not otherwise have had.
The second reading is that the absorbed share is fiction. The work is not being covered, it is being deferred, and the cost is accumulating somewhere you are not measuring: a support backlog, a bookkeeping close that slips a week, a QA queue that grows until it produces an incident. Deferred work bills eventually, and usually at a worse rate than the salary would have.
The third is that a team is absorbing the work through unpaid extra hours. That produces a coverage entry of zero and a vacancy that looks free, right up until one of the people absorbing it resigns. At that point you own two searches instead of one, and the second one starts from a team with less capacity than the first. If that is your situation, the number on this page is understating the cost by a distance and the argument for filling the role does not need a calculator.
Presenting the number without losing the room
- Lead with the weekly figure, not the total. A total is a story about the past and invites an argument about the assumptions that produced it. A weekly figure is a decision: this is what another week of deliberation costs.
- Show the payroll saving before anyone else finds it. If a finance lead spots that you counted lost output and ignored stopped payroll, every other number you brought is now suspect. Put it in the table yourself, as a negative line.
- Separate sunk from remaining. The 30 days the role has already been open cannot be recovered by any decision available in the meeting. Only the days ahead are addressable, and those are what the decision is actually about.
- Leave the delay line at zero unless you can cite it. One unsupportable number in the model is enough to discredit the four supportable ones next to it.
- Never use it to argue for cutting the assessment. The cost of a bad hire contains this entire calculation twice over, plus the salary paid during the failed tenure. Speed is worth buying in sourcing, where it costs you nothing in signal. It is not worth buying in evaluation.
The lever is the search, not the seat
Of the four channels, only one of them responds to anything you can do this week.
The daily cost is set by facts about your business that you cannot change quickly: your margin, your headcount, what the seat is worth, what your team can absorb. The number of days is the only variable in the model that is genuinely under your control, and inside that, sourcing is the stage with the most slack in it.
That is why the scenario table prices the same seat against four different searches rather than four different roles. The gap between a search that starts with a shortlist in hand and one that starts with an empty pipeline is usually two to three weeks, and at a typical net daily cost that gap is worth more than what most searches cost to run. The business case for changing anything about how you source is that gap, and nothing else on the page.
Egypt is where Hire Nile does this. If the cost per week on this page is a number you would rather stop paying, the Egypt offshore salary calculator sizes what the filled seat would cost against an in-house equivalent, and the team cost calculator does the same for a whole roster. Background on the market is in why teams hire from Egypt, and how it works covers the process itself.
Pair this with the rest of the toolkit
This tool prices the wait. The rest of the toolkit shortens it. The hiring timeline planner turns the days input here into a real schedule with the notice period included, and the job description generator produces the brief that search starts from.
For the evaluation stages the vacancy cost should never talk you out of, the interview kit generator builds structured questions and a weighted scorecard, and the onboarding plan generator makes sure day one is productive rather than a second week of waiting.
On the cost side, the Egypt net salary calculator turns a gross Egyptian salary into take-home pay and total employer cost, and the contractor vs employee calculator compares the two engagement models on real cost. For the working calendar itself, see the Egypt public holidays calculator and the time zone overlap planner.
Frequently asked questions
What is cost of vacancy?
Cost of vacancy is the net financial cost of leaving a role unfilled, measured per day or per week. It has four parts: the output the empty seat is not producing, the cash you spend covering the gap with overtime or contractors, any dated consequence of the delay such as a slipped launch, and the loaded payroll you are not paying while the seat is empty. The first three are costs and the fourth is a saving, so the honest figure is a net one. Cost of vacancy is distinct from cost per hire, which is what you spend to run the search itself.
What is the standard cost of vacancy formula?
The formula in general use comes from a 2005 ERE article by Dr. John Sullivan: divide annual company revenue by headcount to get revenue per employee, divide that by the number of working days in a year to get a daily figure, then multiply by the days the role is open, often with a job level multiplier of one to three. It is a reasonable back of the envelope method and it is the ancestor of nearly every online vacancy calculator. This tool follows the same structure with two corrections. It uses gross margin rather than top-line revenue, and it subtracts the salary that stops being paid the day the seat empties.
Why does this calculator subtract the salary?
Because you are not paying it. When someone resigns, their loaded payroll leaves your cost base immediately and does not return until a replacement signs. A calculator that counts the lost output but ignores the saved payroll is measuring only one side of the ledger, and for supporting roles it can overstate the cost by more than the whole answer. Subtracting it also produces a result some vacancy calculators are structurally unable to give you: that on your own numbers, a particular seat is cheap to leave empty. That answer is worth knowing before you spend on a search.
How long does it take to fill a role?
SHRM's 2026 recruiting benchmarking report, based on responses from 4,657 SHRM members collected between November 24, 2025 and January 23, 2026, puts the median time to fill at 39 calendar days for nonexecutive positions and 45 days for executive positions. SHRM measures from the day the requisition opened to the day the offer was accepted, in calendar days including weekends and holidays. That figure ends at offer acceptance, so it does not include the notice period a hired candidate still has to serve.
Should I use revenue per employee or a multiple of salary?
Use margin per employee when the role sits inside a business whose revenue is reasonably evenly produced across headcount, which is most software, agency, and services businesses. Use a multiple of loaded salary when revenue per employee would be misleading, which is common for back office, finance, and support roles, or when you simply do not want a company-wide average standing in for one specific seat. Both are estimates. The seat weighting control matters more than the choice between them, because it is the part that admits a quota-carrying seat and a queue-clearing seat are not worth the same.
Is a vacancy cost the same as the cost of a bad hire?
No, and the distinction changes decisions. Vacancy cost accrues while a seat is empty and stops when someone starts. The cost of a bad hire includes the vacancy cost twice, once before the wrong hire and once during the repeat search, plus the salary paid during the failed tenure, the management time spent on it, and any damage done in the role. This is the main reason a vacancy cost figure should never be used as an argument to skip an assessment stage. Filling a seat quickly with the wrong person is the most expensive outcome on this page.
How many job openings are there right now?
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reported 7.4 million job openings in June 2026, a rate of 4.4 percent, with 5.3 million hires and 5.4 million total separations in the same month, in the JOLTS release published on August 4, 2026. The practical meaning for a hiring plan is that separations and hires are running close together, so the seat you are trying to fill is being competed for at roughly the same rate it is being vacated across the economy.
Stop paying for the search you have not started
The days this calculator prices are mostly sourcing days, and sourcing is the one stage you can hand over without giving up a single hiring decision. Send us the role brief and Hire Nile shares vetted Egyptian candidates with real rates, so the clock you are paying for starts at the interview.