Most companies know their time to fill. According to SHRM’s 2025 recruiting benchmarking data, filling a position still takes about a month and a half, measured from the day the requisition opens to the day the candidate accepts the offer. 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 that month and a half runs.
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 doesn’t get done or someone else does it. Both outcomes have a price.
Here’s a hypothetical example. Say a role pays $60,000 a year. Divided by 250 working days, that’s about $240 a day. If the seat stays empty for 45 days, that’s roughly $10,800 in lost or redistributed productivity, before a single recruiting cost is counted. For a $90,000 role, the same math comes to about $16,200. For a $120,000 role, it’s about $21,600 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 number, and many organizations aren’t measuring it at all.
The team redistribution tax
When a seat goes empty, the work doesn’t 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’s also a financial one. A team of six carrying the workload of seven is running at roughly 117% of its designed capacity (seven divided by six). That pace can hold for days, but rarely for months. Over time, errors can increase, output quality can drop and the people absorbing the extra load may start looking elsewhere. A 2018 Gallup study on employee burnout found that burned out employees were 2.6 times as likely to be actively seeking a different job. A vacancy left open long enough can create more vacancies.
The redistribution tax grows 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 grows 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 revenue impact grows beyond what a simple daily calculation captures.
Customer facing vacancies carry a second risk: accounts without a consistent point of contact can be 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 first search is only the first part of the cost equation. The second part is what happens when the hire doesn’t work out.
A failed hire creates three vacancy windows, not one. Here’s a hypothetical example. The original search takes about 45 days. The hire underperforms and leaves after six months. Then the search runs again, another 45 days or so. That’s about nine months of reduced capacity for what should have been a single filled role.
So the cost of an open position, in this scenario, isn’t a month and a half. It’s closer to nine months, with a full set of recruiting costs paid twice.
Gallup estimates that replacing a frontline employee costs about 40% of their salary, and replacing a leader or manager about 200%. Vacancy time is part of that cost, and one of the least visible parts. Our full guide to bad hire costs breaks down the rest.
How to calculate the cost of an open position on your team
Four steps:
- Count open roles. Identify any position that has been open for more than two weeks in the last 12 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 don’t have exact numbers, use SHRM’s benchmark of about a month and a half (roughly 45 days).
- 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.
For many teams, the total is higher than they expected. The cost of an open position isn’t a recruiting problem sitting inside a budget line. It’s a business continuity problem that lives off budget, invisible until someone adds it up. If you need to bring that number to finance, our guide on how to justify recruiting agency cost shows how to build the case.
What actually reduces the cost of an open position
Filling faster helps. Filling faster with the wrong person creates the double vacancy cycle described above, which costs more 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, confirming must have requirements, like a license, before the offer goes out and comparing finalists with top performers in comparable roles rather than with a generic job description. For high volume frontline employers, even a one week reduction in time to fill can add up across the annual hiring plan.
Speed alone doesn’t fix it. Accurate filters at the top of the funnel matter just as much.
Put your own numbers into our hiring ROI calculator to see what open positions are costing your team right now, or book a call to talk through how to fill them faster.
