Most companies know their time to fill. According to SHRM’s Human Capital Benchmarking Report, the average is 42 days. That number gets tracked, posted in dashboards, and tied to recruiter performance. What almost no one tracks is the cost of an open position while those 42 days are running.
The recruiter fee and the job board spend show up on a budget line. The lost productivity, the extra hours absorbed by the remaining team, and the revenue not generated land nowhere. They spread quietly across payroll, manager bandwidth, and team output until someone runs the full calculation.
This post does that calculation.
What the cost of an open position actually includes
The direct productivity drain
The simplest way to think about it: every day a seat is empty, either the work does not get done or someone else does it. Both outcomes have a price.
For a role with a $60,000 annual salary, the daily output value sits around $240, based on 250 working days. Over 42 days, that is roughly $10,000 in lost or redistributed productivity, before a single recruiting cost is counted. For a $90,000 mid-level role, the same math produces closer to $15,000 over the average fill window. For a senior position at $120,000, the number exceeds $20,000 for the vacancy period alone.
None of these figures appear in a standard cost-per-hire calculation. As we covered in our breakdown of what hiring actually costs, most companies track the fee, not the gap. The cost of an open position is a separate and typically larger number, and most organizations are not measuring it at all.
The team redistribution tax
When a seat goes empty, the work does not disappear. It redistributes. Teammates absorb tasks, managers step in to cover gaps, and everyone on the team quietly takes on a share of what the missing role was supposed to handle.
This is often described as a morale issue. It is also a financial one. A team of six carrying the workload of seven operates at roughly 117% of its designed capacity. That pace holds for days, not months. Over time, errors increase, output quality drops, and the people absorbing the extra load start looking elsewhere. Gallup research on employee burnout consistently links sustained overwork to a 2.6 times higher likelihood of turnover, which means a vacancy left open long enough can generate additional vacancies.
The redistribution tax compounds the longer the seat stays empty, and it never shows up in a cost report.
Revenue impact in customer-facing roles
The math above applies to any role. In sales, account management, or customer support, the cost of an open position compounds through a different mechanism.
An empty sales seat means a pipeline that stalls, a quota that goes unmet, and a territory competitors can move into while the search runs. The longer the seat stays open, the more the downstream revenue impact grows beyond what any vacancy cost calculator captures.
Customer-facing vacancies carry a second risk: accounts without a consistent point of contact are more likely to churn before a replacement is in place. The open position becomes a retention problem, not just a hiring problem.
The double vacancy cycle most budgets ignore
The 42-day window is only the first part of the cost equation. The second part is what happens when the hire does not work out.
As we covered in our full guide to bad hire costs, a failed hire creates three vacancy windows, not one: the original search (42 days), the underperforming hire who eventually exits (often six months), and then the search again (another 42 days). That is roughly ten months of reduced capacity for what should have been a single filled role.
The cost of an open position, in this scenario, is not six weeks. It is closer to ten months, with a full set of recruiting costs run twice.
The full cost of replacing a salaried employee runs between 50% and 200% of their annual salary once all costs are included, as we detailed in our full guide to bad hire costs. The vacancy contribution to that number is one of the largest components, and one of the least visible.
How to calculate the cost of an open position on your team
Four steps, about ten minutes:
- Count open roles. Identify any position that has been open for more than two weeks in the last twelve months.
- Calculate daily output value. Divide the annual salary for each role by 250 working days. This is the productivity floor, not the ceiling.
- Multiply by days open. If you do not have exact numbers, use SHRM’s 42-day average as a benchmark.
- Add the redistribution cost. Estimate the extra hours per week the team absorbed due to the vacancy, multiply by the team’s average hourly cost, and multiply by weeks open.
Most teams that run this exercise find the total is two to three times what they expected. The cost of an open position is not a recruiting problem sitting inside a budget line. It is a business continuity problem that lives off-budget, invisible until someone adds it up.
What actually reduces the cost of an open position
Filling faster helps. Filling faster with the wrong person, however, creates the double vacancy cycle described above, which is more expensive than the original vacancy. The goal is a process that finds the right person faster, not just any person faster.
In practice, that means screening earlier in the process, verifying what candidates claim before the offer goes out, and benchmarking finalists against top performers in comparable roles rather than against a generic job description. For high-volume front-line employers, even a one-week reduction in average time to fill generates meaningful savings across the annual hiring plan.
The companies that consistently reduce the cost of an open position are not the ones with the fastest recruiters. They are the ones with the most accurate filters at the top of the funnel.
Use Workwolf’s hiring ROI calculator to put your own numbers in and see what open positions are costing your team right now.
