Staff turnover rate calculator (UK)
Your turnover and retention rates, split into voluntary and total - benchmarked against real CIPD sector figures rather than a vague industry average.
Your year
Turnover = leavers ÷ average headcount × 100, where average headcount is (start + end) ÷ 2. Replacement cost uses a £15,000 rule-of-thumb per hire (advertising, agency, management time, onboarding and lost productivity) - swap in your own figure if you track it.
Turnover rate = leavers ÷ average headcount × 100. Six leavers against an average headcount of 26 is 23%. But the number that tells you anything is voluntary turnover - people who chose to go. A redundancy round and a resignation wave produce the same headline figure and mean opposite things.
How do you calculate staff turnover?
- Count the leavers in the period - everyone who left, for any reason.
- Average the headcount: (headcount at the start + headcount at the end) ÷ 2.
- Divide and multiply by 100.
Then run it again counting only resignations. The gap between the two numbers is the story: high total but low voluntary means you restructured; high voluntary means people are choosing to leave.
What is a good staff turnover rate in the UK?
Most calculators quote a vague "15-20%" - a figure with no traceable primary source. The real picture is more specific, and more useful. CIPD's analysis of the Annual Population Survey puts overall UK churn at 34% - of which 27.4% move to a new employer and 6.6% leave the workforce entirely (study, retirement, long-term sickness). It varies enormously by sector:
| Sector | Attrition |
|---|---|
| Public administration & defence | ~25% (lowest) |
| UK overall churn | 34% |
| Hospitality (accommodation & food) | ~52% (highest) |
So "is 23% bad?" has no answer without your sector. A restaurant at 23% is doing extraordinarily well; a public-sector back office at 23% has a problem. Compare against your industry, and against your own trend last year - that second comparison is usually the more honest one.
What does turnover actually cost?
Replacing someone costs far more than the advert. Count the recruiter or job board, the hiring manager's and interviewers' time, onboarding, and the months before a new starter is fully productive. A commonly used rule of thumb for a mid-level UK role is £10,000-£20,000 per hire - and for a salaried role, the ongoing cost is bigger still: our true cost of an employee calculator shows what a £30,000 hire really costs once NI and pension land.
Worth separating that from cost per hire, which is narrower: recruitment spend only - agency fees, advertising, tools and internal interview time - divided by hires made. It usually lands in the low thousands, not the low tens of thousands, because it excludes onboarding and the ramp-up months. Both numbers are useful, for different arguments: work out your cost per hire to judge the hiring process, and use replacement cost to justify the retention work.
How do you actually reduce it?
- Find out why people leave - and ask someone other than their line manager. The exit interview form covers the questions worth asking.
- Watch the first year. Early leavers usually point at recruitment or onboarding, not pay - see the onboarding checklist.
- Listen before they resign. Regular 1:1s and eNPS surface the problem while it's still fixable.
- Check flexibility. A refused flexible working request is a common trigger for a resignation three months later.
- Look at absence too. Rising absence often precedes resignations - the absence rate calculator and Bradford Factor are the early-warning pair.
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate staff turnover rate?
Divide the number of leavers in the period by the average headcount, then multiply by 100. Average headcount is the headcount at the start plus the headcount at the end, divided by two.
What is the difference between voluntary and total turnover?
Total turnover counts everyone who left for any reason, including redundancy, dismissal and retirement. Voluntary turnover counts only resignations - people who chose to leave - which is the figure an employer can actually influence.
How much does staff turnover cost?
A commonly used rule of thumb for a mid-level UK role is £10,000 to £20,000 per replacement, covering advertising or agency fees, management and interview time, onboarding, and lost productivity while the new starter gets up to speed.
How do you calculate retention rate?
Retention rate is the mirror of turnover: 100% minus the turnover rate. It is sometimes calculated only on employees present at the start of the period, which excludes people who joined and left within it.
This calculator applies the statutory rules as published and shows its working, but it cannot know your contracts, your policies or anything unusual about the case. Treat the figure as a starting point, and take advice on anything contested or expensive.
See it coming, not afterwards
CoDash tracks starters, leavers and tenure automatically - alongside eNPS, anonymous voice and absence patterns, so retention problems show up while you can still do something.