The real cost of a resignation in 2026.
Recruitment fees are the visible part. The vacant weeks, the months to full effectiveness and the people who leave because someone else did cost more, and most organisations never add them up.
On this page
Recruitment is the visible line; the vacant weeks and the ramp-up are the largest. Work the number out once with stated assumptions, split it into avoidable and unavoidable by asking leavers, and put the avoidable figure next to the fix.
A resignation costs an organisation far more than the recruitment invoice. The invoice is the one line that lands on a budget, so it is the line people quote: in 2026 the median cost of recruiting one employee is £2,000, and £3,500 for a senior manager or director, according to the CIPD’s survey of more than a thousand HR professionals. Add the weeks the role sits empty, the months before the replacement is fully effective, the induction and the manager’s time, and a single resignation on an ordinary salary costs the organisation a sum closer to a quarter of that salary. Only a quarter of organisations that know their turnover rate have ever worked this out.
What is in the number
Recruitment
The advertising, agency or search fee, the assessment and the time of everyone who interviewed. The CIPD medians above are what organisations reported paying per hire; they are accurate to within about a fifth, they are higher than two years ago after a period of falling, and the private-sector median for a senior appointment is £5,000.
The vacant weeks
Between the leaver going and the replacement starting, the work is either not done, done by colleagues on top of their own, or bought in. The CIPD finds that only 31% of organisations track time to hire at all, so most have no figure for this. We suggest costing it as a share of the role’s weekly salary for the number of weeks vacant.
Time to full effectiveness
Nobody is fully productive in week one. How long it takes depends on the role, and there is little reliable published data on it, so the honest approach is to make an assumption, state it and apply it consistently. We suggest a number of weeks at a reduced level of output, costed against salary.
Induction, training and manager time
The formal induction, any mandatory or role training, and the hours the manager and the team spend bringing the new person up to speed.
The ripple
The costs that do not fit a spreadsheet: the customer relationship that went with the leaver, the colleague who starts looking because the team has lost its third person this year, the knowledge that was never written down. These are real, in our experience they are often the largest, and we leave them out of the arithmetic below precisely so that the number is one nobody can argue with.
An illustrative worked example
Illustrative. An organisation of 500 people with 15% annual turnover loses 75 people a year. Using the CIPD median recruitment cost for an ordinary employee and the ONS median full-time earnings of £39,039 (£750.75 a week), with our suggested assumptions of 8 weeks vacant at half the role’s value, 12 weeks to full effectiveness at half productivity, and £1,000 of induction, training and manager time:
| Cost line | Basis | Per leaver |
|---|---|---|
| Recruitment | CIPD 2026 median, other employees | £2,000 |
| Vacant weeks | 8 weeks × half of £750.75 | £3,003 |
| Time to full effectiveness | 12 weeks × half of £750.75 | £4,504 |
| Induction, training and manager time | Our suggested allowance | £1,000 |
| Total per leaver | Before any ripple cost | £10,507 |
| Total per year | 75 leavers | £788,025 |
Each percentage point of turnover in this organisation is five people, or £52,535 a year. Change the salary, the weeks or the shares to match your own organisation and the shape of the answer does not change: the recruitment fee is a small line, and the time is the largest. Our free turnover cost calculator does this arithmetic with your own figures.
The number that matters more: how much of it was avoidable
The total cost of turnover is a useful shock, but it is not the number to take to a board, because some turnover is healthy. People retire, relocate, change career and get promotions you could not offer. The number that matters is the cost of the leaving that the organisation could have prevented, and the only way to know it is to ask the leavers.
Across the 30 UK organisations in our leaver benchmark over the latest twelve months, the median share of leavers who left with dissatisfaction a factor runs between 44% and 52% depending on sector, and between organisations in the same sector it runs from 15% to 67%. Illustrative: apply the private-sector median of 52% to the organisation above and 39 of its 75 leavers went unhappy, at a cost of about £409,773 a year before any ripple. Not every one of those resignations was preventable, but every one of them came with a reason the organisation could have known about earlier, and in every sector of our benchmark the reasons cited most often include career progression, personal growth and cooperation, all of which an organisation can do something about.
Three things to do with the number
Work it out once, properly, and agree the assumptions
Use your own salary distribution rather than the national median, your own time-to-hire if you track it, and state every assumption on the page. A number with its basis shown survives a finance director; a number without one does not.
Split it into avoidable and unavoidable
That needs an exit process people actually complete and that asks what mattered, not a tick-box form. How to choose an exit interview approach covers the options; raising completion rates covers the response problem.
Put the avoidable figure next to the fix
A development conversation, a clearer promotion process or a manager’s training costs a fraction of one resignation. When the cost of the leaving and the cost of the fix sit on the same page, the decision tends to make itself.
We help organisations do all three: LastOpinion asks every leaver what mattered and what would have kept them, reports the avoidable share by team and tenure, and benchmarks it against other UK organisations.
Drawn from the CIPD Resourcing and talent planning report 2026 (published September 2026, in partnership with Omni RMS, 1,014 respondents), ONS Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings 2025 (provisional, published October 2025) and the great{with}talent leaver benchmark, computed from LastOpinion exit questionnaires at 30 UK organisations over the latest twelve months. The worked example is illustrative; the vacancy, ramp-up and induction assumptions are ours and are stated so you can change them. This piece updates an earlier great{with}talent paper on the value of exit questionnaires (2020), whose cost figures are no longer current. See also Why people leave: a year of UK exit data.
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