Tools
Cost of vacancy calculator
Pick a discipline, adjust the inputs, and see the daily and cumulative cost of the vacancy next to what a properly resourced search would cost. Built for critical facilities, construction and AI infrastructure roles.
Calculator
Vacancy cost estimate
Nothing is stored or submitted. Every figure updates as you type.
Started with the Critical Facilities Engineer preset at $99,000 base, the middle of the band on that page. Change any field below.
Daily vacancy cost
$1,794
1 seat at $1,794 per seat per day.
- Cost to date
- 30 days open so far
- $53,827
- Remaining cost
- 30 modeled delay days
- $53,827
- Total vacancy cost
- Open time plus modeled delay
- $107,654
- Search investment
- 1 seat in scope
- $0
- Delay cost
- Compare against the search investment
- $53,827
- Break-even
- Vacancy cost compared with search investment
- Add investment
Daily figure breakdown
- Lost output: $609 (1.6x fully loaded daily salary)
- Coverage and overtime: $285
- Schedule and operational risk: $900
Cost by days open
Vacancy cost at each mark, at $1,794 per day.
- 30 days$53,827
- 60 days$107,654
- 90 days$161,481
- 120 days$215,308
- 180 days$322,962
Estimate only. Use your own assumptions. This is not a forecast of your results.
Hidden delay costs
Most hiring plans price outside support and ignore the delay. In a data center program the delay hits the schedule: commissioning scripts, switchgear coordination and turnover packages all wait on the open role. When the seat responsible for that work is empty, the milestone moves and the cost shows up somewhere else in the budget, where nobody ties it to hiring.
Funding conversations
Take the daily figure, apply your own delay assumption, and compare it to the search investment line. If the delay costs more than the engagement, the recruiting budget is the smaller question.
Exclusions
Attrition risk on the team covering the gap, quality-of-work degradation, deferred preventive maintenance, and the compounding effect of two open seats in the same discipline. Those are real and they are hard to defend numerically, so the estimate stays conservative without them.
FAQ
Questions
- What is cost of vacancy?
- The money an open seat costs you every day it stays open: work that does not get done, overtime and coverage absorbed by the existing team, and the schedule or operational risk carried while the role is empty. It accrues every day the seat is open.
- How is the daily figure calculated?
- Fully loaded daily salary times a role-specific output multiple, plus coverage hours at your overtime rate, plus a per-day schedule and operational risk figure for that discipline. Multiply by open seats to get the daily total.
- Why is downtime risk higher for some roles?
- A commissioning agent or construction project manager sits on the critical path to energization, so a day lost moves a milestone date. A GPU cluster engineer sits next to accelerated compute that bills whether or not it is used. Both carry more per-day risk than a role with substitutable coverage.
- What delay assumption should we use?
- Use your own planning assumption for the role, market and hiring process. The calculator does not publish fill-time benchmarks or promise a hiring outcome.
- Is this a guarantee of savings?
- No. The calculator is a planning estimate that helps compare the cost of waiting against the cost of resourcing a search properly. It is not a forecast and it does not promise a hiring outcome.
- What do we do with the number?
- Use it to fund the search, defend a compensation exception, or decide whether to run intelligence first.
Next step
Tell us the roles, the market and the milestone dates. You'll get a diagnostic and a plan.