30/06/2026
Every business knows exactly what it costs to hire someone. The job ad spend, the agency fee, the hours spent in interviews. It's all tracked, all approved, all sitting neatly in a budget line somewhere.
Almost no business tracks what it costs when someone leaves.
The real number is far bigger than most people assume. Replacing a mid-level employee typically costs between £30,000 and £60,000 once you account for recruitment, the productivity dip during the notice period, onboarding the replacement, and the months it takes a new hire to reach full effectiveness. For senior or specialist roles, that figure can climb to 150% or even 200% of annual salary.
And that's before you factor in the costs that never make it onto a spreadsheet. The institutional knowledge that walks out the door. The client relationships that have to be rebuilt from scratch. The strain on the colleagues left behind, who absorb the extra workload while a vacancy sits open, and who are now statistically more likely to start looking elsewhere themselves.
The UK's average employee turnover rate currently sits at 35%, meaning more than a third of the workforce changes jobs every single year. Yet retention is still treated as a soft, secondary concern in most organisations, while recruitment gets its own budget, its own metrics, and its own seat at the leadership table.
The maths doesn't support that imbalance. Every employee who stays an extra year is, quite literally, money saved. Every employee who leaves because of poor management, no progression, or a culture that never invested in them, is a cost that was almost entirely avoidable.
Retention isn't a nice to have. It's one of the highest return investments a business can make.
Has your organisation ever actually calculated what turnover is costing you? 👇
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