Cost of vacancy is the value lost for every day a role stays unfilled. Choose the revenue-per-employee method or a salary proxy, enter your own figures, and get a daily, weekly and cumulative number for the roles you have open right now.
There is no single agreed formula for cost of vacancy. These are the two that stand up in a budget conversation — pick whichever your finance team would accept.
$400
Per day, per role
$2,000
Per working week
$18,000
Over 45 days
$72,000
Across 4 open roles
Basis: $12,000,000 revenue ÷ 120 employees ÷ 250 working days. This is an estimate built entirely from your inputs — no hidden multiplier. It deliberately excludes the knock-on costs that are real but unmeasurable from here: overtime absorbed by the rest of the team, delayed projects, and the attrition risk of covering a gap for months.
If that number is uncomfortable, the fix is usually process, not headcount. See how Pitch N Hire compresses the stages where the days actually go.
Use the revenue method when the role contributes to output broadly and revenue per employee is a fair reflection of that, which is usually true in services, agencies and most commercial teams. Use the salary proxy when revenue per head would mislead — a compliance officer or an internal platform engineer does not map cleanly to revenue, but their fully loaded cost and expected contribution do. Whichever you pick, quote the method alongside the number. A cost-of-vacancy figure without its method is easy to dismiss, and being able to explain the arithmetic is what makes it persuasive.
Plenty of cost-of-vacancy tools apply an internal multiplier and present the output as a fact. We do not, because the commonly quoted multipliers trace back to secondary citations with no primary research behind them, and a number you cannot defend is worse than no number at all. Everything above comes from inputs you set, and the calculator shows the arithmetic it used so you can reproduce or challenge it. If you want the other half of the picture, what cost per hire actually includes covers the cost of filling the role, and reducing time to fill covers where the days usually go.
Most of the cost above is scheduling gaps, slow screening and stalled decisions. See how Pitch N Hire compresses those stages on your real roles.
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