Estimate what voluntary attrition costs your organisation each year — recruitment, onboarding and the productivity lost while a replacement gets up to speed. Built to be conservative enough to survive a finance review.
Your organisation
$1,298,500
estimated annual cost of voluntary turnover — roughly 7.4% of payroll, across 35 leavers a year
$14,000
Recruitment, per leaver
$5,600
Onboarding & training, per leaver
$17,500
Lost productivity during ramp
That is $37,100 every time someone resigns. Cutting attrition by a single percentage point would save roughly $92,750 a year.
Conservative estimate. It excludes lost institutional knowledge, the productivity dip of the departing person’s notice period, and the load on the colleagues covering the gap — all of which are real and none of which are reliably quantifiable. Nothing you type leaves your browser.
Every leaver costs you three things, and only the first one shows up in a budget line:
It is easy to produce an alarming figure by assuming the highest published multiplier and counting every soft cost. It is also easy to have that figure dismissed. This calculator stays deliberately at the low end, so the output survives the question “where did that come from?” — and it is still, for most organisations, a number that changes the conversation.
Commonly cited estimates range from roughly half an annual salary for junior roles to twice the salary for senior or specialist ones. This calculator stays at the conservative end, because a defensible number you can put in front of a CFO is far more useful than a dramatic one they can dismiss.
Three things: recruitment cost as a percentage of salary, onboarding and training at a conservative 8% of salary, and lost productivity during ramp — modelled as the new starter working at about half capacity until they reach full productivity.
Lost institutional knowledge, the departing person's reduced output during their notice period, the load on colleagues who cover the gap, the effect on team morale, and any customer relationships that leave with them. All are real costs; none can be estimated honestly from three input fields.
It varies enormously by sector — hospitality and retail routinely run above 30%, while professional services often sit near 10%. The number worth watching is not your overall rate but your regretted attrition: the people you wanted to keep.
By moving the detection point earlier. Intent-to-stay, manager effectiveness and burnout scores typically deteriorate months before resignations arrive, and at that stage the problem is usually still fixable — workload, a manager conversation, a growth path. Once someone has accepted another offer, you are paying the full cost in this calculator.
TruePulse tracks intent-to-stay, manager effectiveness and burnout risk by team, and flags the segments trending down. Free — every feature, every seat.
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