Cost Per Hire Calculator

Few recruiting metrics are as revealing, or as easy to misjudge, as the all-in price of bringing someone aboard. Tracking cost per hire shows where recruitment dollars go, surfaces inefficiencies, and gives you a yardstick for the whole hiring operation. The calculator compares your result with $4,700, the average cost per hire SHRM reported in April 2022. SHRM's 2025 recruiting benchmarking brief reports medians instead, $1,200 for nonexecutive hires and $10,625 for executive hires, so one average hides a wide spread by role.

The math is a division: total recruiting expenses over the number of hires made in a given period. SHRM's benchmarking counts agency fees, advertising and job boards, job fairs, referral costs, applicant and staff travel, relocation, recruiter pay and benefits, and talent acquisition systems. The calculator groups them into five lines, so CPH = (Recruiting Tools & Software + Advertising & Job Boards + Agency Fees + Referral Bonuses + Allocated Recruiter Salaries) / Number of Hires. Costs without a line of their own, such as travel, relocation or background checks, go into the closest one.

Accuracy lives in the costs people forget to add, hiring manager hours and software subscriptions chief among them. Counting only external agency fees produces a tidy, flattering number that bears little resemblance to reality. And a rock-bottom figure is not automatically a win: if cutting recruiting spend lands you weaker hires or faster turnover, the savings were borrowed against future cost.