Method
How we work out the cost of a vacancy
The cost of an unfilled vacancy is the output the role would have produced, less the salary that is not being paid while the seat is empty. We take output per pound of pay from the Office for National Statistics, working days from the calendar, and time to fill from our own filled roles. There are three assumptions in it, all listed below, and the calculator lets you change every one of them.
· last verified 10 September 2026 · source: ONS FZLN (2026 Q1) and our own filled-role records · regenerated when ONS publishes
The sum
| Step | How | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Working days empty | calendar days × 0.714 | 30 |
| Pay per working day | salary ÷ 260 | £135 |
| Output per working day | pay per day × 1.68 | £226 |
| Output not produced | output per day × working days empty | £6,785 |
| Salary not paid | pay per day × working days empty | £4,038 |
| Net cost | output not produced − salary not paid | £2,746 |
Where each number comes from
- Output per pound of pay — 1.68. The Office for National Statistics publishes the labour share of income for the whole UK economy: employee compensation as a share of income. It reads 59.7% for 2026 Q1, released 17 August 2026, so £1 of pay sits alongside £1.68 of output. Series FZLN, dataset UCST: Labour share of income: Whole economy SA: percentage: UK. Open Government Licence v3.0. Next release 17 November 2026.
- Time to fill — 42 days, median of 46. Our own filled roles, the same records published one by one on the case studies, measured as the days between a role opening and closing as filled. Per-sector medians carry the count behind them because some of them are thin.
- Advertised pay. The median of what employers are currently advertising for the leading role in each sector, read from live adverts. Only adverts where the employer stated a salary are counted, and a role with fewer than 8 stated salaries gets no figure. Pay figures read from live job adverts on Adzuna (adzuna.co.uk). Full pay method.
The three assumptions
- 260 working days a year. 52 weeks of five days. Holiday and bank holidays are NOT deducted: a vacancy does not take annual leave, and deducting them would make the daily figure larger, which would flatter the calculation.
- Calendar days are converted to working days. Time to fill is measured in calendar days, so it is converted at five working days in seven before it meets a daily cost. Skipping that step overstates the cost by two fifths.
- The salary is treated as the whole employment cost. The salary typed in is treated as the whole employment cost. Employer National Insurance and pension sit on top of it, so the output figure this produces is CONSERVATIVE — the real one is larger.
What this does not claim
It is not a measurement of your business. The labour share is a whole-economy average across every industry, and a role in a high-margin business will be worth more than it says, a role in a low-margin one less. It also leaves out everything that cannot be read from a public dataset — cover, overtime, delayed projects, work lost to a competitor, and the strain on the people covering the gap. Those are real costs and we are not going to put a number on them we cannot show you the working for.
Cite this
TalentFinder UK, “Cost of vacancy calculator”, 10 September 2026. https://www.talentfinderuk.co.uk/tools/cost-of-vacancy-calculator. Lost-output factor derived from ONS series FZLN (2026 Q1); time to fill from TalentFinder's own 46 published filled roles.