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Tools - Cost of Vacancy
An unfilled engineering role is not free while you decide. This works out what it costs per day, what it has cost so far, and where it lands at 30, 60 and 90 days. Every assumption is yours to change, and the salary bands come from real 2026 accepted offers.
Your assumptions
There is no honest industry constant for the cost of a vacancy. These are the numbers doing the work, so change them to your own and the answer changes with them.
Cost of this vacancy
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Cost so far
We will email this breakdown with the assumptions written out, so you can forward it rather than rebuild it.
The breakdown is on its way. If you want this role filled rather than costed, we can usually get to a signed offer inside 21 days.
Start a hiring campaign →Methodology
The base band is the 25th to 75th percentile of accepted offers from active Re:Sourced searches in 2026, the same dataset behind the Salary Checker and the Salary Guide 2026. The midpoint of that band is loaded with the statutory employer on-costs for the market, the same figures the Cost-to-Hire calculator uses, to get the fully loaded annual cost of the role.
That annual figure is divided across 220 working days, which is a year after weekends, public holidays and leave. The daily cost of the vacancy is then the output the empty seat is not producing, set by your value multiple, plus the share of the remaining team's time absorbed by covering the gap. Elapsed cost counts working days, not calendar days, so a role open over Christmas does not accrue cost on days nobody was going to work anyway.
We have not put an industry figure behind the value multiple, because we do not think a credible one exists. The default of 2.0 is conservative on purpose. If your team knows its own revenue per engineer, use that instead: the point of this tool is that the assumption is visible and yours, not ours.
These are planning estimates, not financial advice. For a named-employer read on a specific brief, start a hiring campaign.
Common questions
It converts the fully loaded cost of the role into a daily figure, then adds two things: the output the empty seat is not producing, set by a value multiple you control, and the share of the remaining team's time absorbed by covering the gap. Every assumption is an input you can change.
You choose it. The default of 2.0 is deliberately conservative: a role producing less than its own fully loaded cost would not be worth opening, and most engineering teams plan on more. There is no credible industry constant here, so the calculator makes the assumption visible instead of burying it.
No. It measures what the vacancy itself costs while it stays open. You can enter a one-off cost of filling the role, an agency fee or a referral bonus, and it will tell you how many days of vacancy that spend is equal to.
It is a planning estimate built from your own assumptions, not a forecast. It is designed to be taken into a budget conversation where every input can be questioned and changed on the spot.