Calculator for firms What does a bad hire cost your firm?

Most firms count the recruitment fee and stop there. The bigger cost sits in everything around it. Move the sliders and see the number.

The sums run in your browser. Nothing you type is saved, and nothing is sent to us unless you choose to add it to a booking. You do not need to give a name or an email to use it.

Salary of the role£50,000

Months in the role before it fails6 months

Change the assumptions

Recruiter fee20%

Published legal recruitment fees run from about 18% to 25% of first-year salary. Set 0 if you did not use a recruiter.

Hourly fee of a fee earner£133

The Law Society's 2025 median is £133. We also use it to value a supervisor's hour.

Supervisor hours a week on training and corrections3 hours

Our assumption. No UK source gives this figure.

Months the role stays empty afterwards3 months

Roughly the three-month notice a replacement usually serves.

What the sums cannot count

A bad hire costs more than the number above. Tick anything that happened the last time you hired the wrong person. This is a private check, and nothing you tick leaves your browser.

Colleagues took on extra work, or started to look elsewhere
A client or a partner raised a concern about the work
Management time went on a performance process instead of fee-earning
A better candidate accepted another offer while the role was open
The team lost confidence in how we hire
A file was missed, delayed or had to be corrected

None ticked. If that is true, good. If it changes, come back to this.

How we worked this out

An estimate, not accounting, legal or HR advice. Your own figures will differ. Every line above is salary and months in post turned into money in a simple way, and you can change the assumptions.

From published sources: employer National Insurance and pension rates (gov.uk), the median hourly fee and annual chargeable hours of a fee earner (Law Society, 2025), and the usual range of recruiter fees. A hire who is struggling is taken to deliver about half of a full output, a midpoint because no UK source gives a figure.

Our own allowances: the supervision hours, two colleagues losing an hour a week each, 10% of the hire’s billed work written off or lost with the client, and a 3% chance of a claim costing £50,000 (the insurance excess, the higher premium and the time spent). No UK source measures these, so we show them rather than leave them out.

About “poor fit”: it means skills, standards and ways of working. It never means a protected characteristic such as age, sex, race, disability or religion, and judging someone on those is unlawful.

The sums assume a fee-earning role. Ending someone’s contract needs a fair, documented process: take employment advice first.

One bad hire costs about

£97,286

That is about 1.9 times the salary, from 6 months in post.

Salary paid out£29,031
Pay, employer National Insurance and pension for the months they were in post.
Lost time to training£10,375
3 supervisor hours a week spent on training and corrections, at the value of an hour they could have billed.
Fee-earner output lost£25,704
A hire who is struggling delivers about half of a full fee earner's output.
Disruption to the wider team£6,917
2 colleagues each covering or re-doing work for 1 hour a week.
The right hire not in the seat£11,188
Margin lost while the role is empty for 3 months before the right person starts.
Recruiter fee£10,000
20% of first-year salary, paid to find the person who did not work out.
Reputation and client dissatisfaction£2,570
Work that is written off, discounted or lost because a client was unhappy.
Allowance for an insurance claim£1,500
A small allowance for the chance that a poor hire makes an error that becomes a claim.

For comparison, Oxford Economics for Unum put the cost of replacing a legal employee at about £39,900 in 2014 prices.

Work out yours properly

If you book, these figures are added to the booking so James knows what you are weighing up. Nothing is sent unless you book or choose to send them above.