Cost of Vacancy Calculator
Your numbers, not ours. We supply the BLS wage for the trade; everything else is yours, because an industry average would not be true of your business.
Most vacancy calculators hand you a number before you have typed anything, which means the number is theirs and not yours. This one opens with the only figure we can source — the BLS median wage for the trade, spread over a working year — and says plainly that a wage you are not paying is a saving, not a cost. The number that matters needs the three figures only you know. The formula is printed below it, so you can check the arithmetic rather than trust it.
Have someone look at these numbers with you.
Send the figures above and we will come back on what filling this seat tends to take for this trade, from searches we have actually closed rather than a published benchmark. One reply from a person, not a sequence.
Got it. We will come back to you on what this search tends to take.
That did not go through. Try again, or call 314.287.3782 and we will take it down by hand.
The arithmetic, in full
Daily contribution lost = revenue per employee ÷ 250 × gross margin
Daily coverage cost = weekly coverage ÷ 5
Daily wage saved = wage × (1 + burden) ÷ 250
Net cost per day = contribution lost + coverage cost − wage saved
Cost of the vacancy = net cost per day × days open
Total cost of the opening = cost of the vacancy + cost to fill
A year is treated as 250 working days throughout. That is a convention, not a measurement, and it is the only number on this page we have chosen for you besides the BLS wage.
What this page will not tell you
- How long the seat will stay open. We publish how long our own searches take - 21 days median, first contact to hire, from 88 timed searches - on the Hiring Index, and we are careful to say there that it is not a time-to-fill benchmark. Anyone who quotes you a national time-to-fill for commercial trades should be asked how many placements it is drawn from.
- What other contractors spend. We have not surveyed them, so we have nothing to report.
- A multiple of salary. The common rule of thumb that a vacancy costs some multiple of the salary is not something we can source, and it collapses the two things that actually drive the answer: your margin and your coverage cost.
Common questions
What does an unfilled trade position actually cost per day?
An unfilled trade position costs, each day, the gross profit that seat would have produced plus whatever you spend covering the work, minus the wage you are not paying while it sits open; My Trade Talent's calculator on this page works it out from your own revenue per field employee and gross margin. We do not publish a typical figure, because a typical figure across commercial trades would not be true of any particular contractor.
Why does the calculator subtract the unpaid wage?
Because you are genuinely not paying it. A vacancy model that ignores the saved wage overstates the cost, sometimes by a lot on lower-margin work. The honest number is the net: lost contribution plus coverage cost, less the fully burdened wage you are not spending.
How long does it take to fill a commercial trade role?
The box is deliberately empty, because we do not have this figure for you. We do publish a timing figure - the Hiring Index median is 21 calendar days from our first contact with the candidate to the hire, across 88 timed searches in 2026 year to date - but that is not time to fill. Our clock starts when we reach the candidate, not when your requisition opened, and it stops at the hire rather than the start date. Use your own history here: the days between approving the req and the person starting.
Should cost to hire be counted in the cost of the vacancy?
No, and the calculator separates them. What you spend to fill the role is incurred whether the seat sits open for a week or a quarter, so folding it into the vacancy cost makes a slow hire look cheaper per day than it is. The page shows the vacancy cost, the cost to fill, and the combined cost of the opening as three numbers.
Where does the wage figure come from?
The median annual wage for each trade is the BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook figure for the occupation we map that trade to. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook. Wages are May 2025; employment is the 2025 base year; growth and annual openings are the 2025-35 projections. It is a national median, so it will be wrong for your market in one direction or the other - overwrite it with what you actually pay.
Method and sources
- Wage figures — BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook. Wages are May 2025; employment is the 2025 base year; growth and annual openings are the 2025-35 projections. Each trade is mapped to the occupation BLS publishes it under.
- 3 trades are not in the selector - Fire Protection, Physical Security, Commercial Irrigation - because BLS does not publish a median for the occupation we would map them to. Enter the wage directly for those.
- Everything else is yours. No figure on this page about your business, your market or your hiring timeline comes from us.
- Annual replacement rate is our own arithmetic: BLS publishes projected average annual openings and base-year employment separately, and this is the first divided by the second.
- Nothing entered here is sent anywhere. The calculation runs in your browser and the page stores nothing.
If the problem is the invoice, not the total.
Budget timing is a different problem from price. The same engagement can run as pay as you go: a $1,500 monthly retainer while the search is open (separate from the Talent Pipeline subscription, which starts at $4,000 a month), credited in full against the fee when we place someone. You pay whichever is greater - the agreed fee, or the months already paid - so up to the break-even month it is a smaller bill at hire, and past it the monthly payments have already covered more than the fee.
