What Happens When a Commercial Trades Position Stays Open for 90 Days?

Short answer: A 90-day vacancy is not just three months of saved payroll. In the commercial trades, the open seat can move cost into overtime, subcontracting, missed service calls, slower estimates, delayed projects, manager workload, customer risk and lost revenue. The right cost-of-vacancy calculation is role-specific: ask what work cannot happen, who absorbs it and what that constraint is worth each week.

Key takeaways

• Unpaid salary isn't savings. The work the seat was supposed to do still has a cost, whether it gets done late, at overtime rates or not at all.
• Start with lost output. Billable service hours, estimates, projects supervised, crews led, accounts or inspections: whatever that person would have owned.
• Count who absorbs the work. Overtime, premium subcontract labor, callbacks and your best people covering two jobs.
• Count the management time. Owners, GMs, operations and HR all lose hours to an open seat.
• Then compare. Once the weekly cost is visible, weigh it against recruiting help, a pay adjustment or a faster interview process.

How to read this report

There's no federal statistic for what an open trades seat costs, and we don't use a universal multiplier. This report is recruiting analysis: five places a 90-day vacancy shows up in a commercial trades business, meant to be filled in with your own production, payroll and customer numbers. My Trade Talent's published track record only comes in where it's named.

1. Lost productive capacity

Start with the output the missing person would have owned: billable service hours, estimates, projects supervised, crews led, accounts managed or inspections completed. Avoid a fake universal multiplier; use your own production economics.

That output looks different by seat. For a commercial HVAC service tech, it's calls that don't get run. For a commercial roofing estimator, it's bids that don't go out. For a commercial construction superintendent, it's a job running without its field leader. Ninety days is about 13 weeks, so whatever that weekly number is, it repeats about 13 times.

2. Overtime and overload

If the work still has to happen, somebody else absorbs it. Measure it directly:

• Overtime: Hours your existing crew is logging to cover the gap.
• Premium subcontract labor: Work you'd normally self-perform, bought at a markup.
• Travel and callbacks: Extra trips and return visits when coverage is thin.
• Lost productivity: What your best people stop doing when they cover two jobs.

The last one is the easiest to miss. The people covering an open seat for a full quarter are the ones doing the most extra work, and the overload doesn't stay on the payroll report.

3. Management drag

Open seats consume owner, GM, operations and HR time. Track the hours spent screening, rescheduling, covering customer escalations and reworking the hiring process. Over 90 days, that's a quarter of leadership attention going to a problem instead of the business. If the process itself keeps restarting, it's worth a look at how to optimize your recruitment process.

4. Customer and schedule risk

Some vacancy costs are probabilistic but real:

• Slower response on service calls
• Missed deadlines and project stacking
• Fewer bids submitted
• Delayed closeout
• A customer who stops trusting the team

None of these show up as a line item in the first month. By month three, they're the ones most likely to follow you into next year's work.

5. The recruiting decision

Once the weekly vacancy cost is visible, you can compare it with the cost of recruiting help, a compensation adjustment or a faster interview process. That's a better decision than treating recruiting spend as an isolated expense.

It also changes which seat you fill first. Some roles are simply slower to fill; our list of the hardest commercial trades positions to fill in 2026 is a useful companion when deciding where to start. And the cost of a rushed fill is real too, as the real cost of a bad hire in the trades lays out. The goal is a faster right hire, not any hire. If you're weighing recruiting models, see flat-rate vs. contingency recruiting.

Why we see this search differently

My Trade Talent recruits direct-hire across 20 commercial trades, with 597+ completed placements since 2022 across 240 distinct position titles. Across that many titles, the cost of a 90-day gap isn't one number: an open estimator seat and an open service tech seat hurt different parts of the business. We work on a flat monthly model, not a percentage-of-salary fee, which makes the comparison in section 5 simple: a known monthly cost against the weekly cost of the empty seat.

Bottom line

Use My Trade Talent's Cost of Vacancy calculator with your own numbers, then prioritize searches by economic impact. The most expensive vacancy is not always the oldest vacancy; it is the seat constraining the most valuable work. If a seat has been open long enough that you're doing this math, schedule a discovery call.

About the author

Michael Carter is President of My Trade Talent. He has been building outbound hiring programs since 2014, and commercial-trades talent pipelines since 2021. His work focuses on helping commercial-trades employers build repeatable direct-hire pipelines for hard-to-reach talent.