Question 1

How do you calculate the cost of staff turnover?

Accepted Answer

Add four things together for each leaver: what you spent advertising or paying an agency, the manager hours consumed by sifting, interviewing and onboarding, the paid induction and training hours for both the new starter and whoever trains them, and the lost output while the replacement gets up to speed. The last one is the largest and the one most operators leave out entirely.

Question 2

How much does it cost to replace a hospitality employee?

Accepted Answer

For an hourly-paid team member, a conservative calculation using realistic UK wage rates and a six-week ramp-up typically lands somewhere in the low thousands of pounds. For a salaried manager it is materially higher, because the recruitment process is longer and the productivity gap lasts months rather than weeks. The calculator on this page shows the working rather than asserting a single figure.

Question 3

What is a normal staff turnover rate in UK hospitality?

Accepted Answer

UK hospitality routinely runs at 70-80% annual turnover, which makes the industry average a very low bar. Well-run operations get into the 30-50% range. A more useful number to track than the headline rate is the share of leavers who go inside their first 90 days — if that is high, the problem is onboarding and line management rather than the labour market.

Question 4

Does this calculator include lost sales from being understaffed?

Accepted Answer

No, deliberately. Lost covers, the service dip on a rota carried by new starters, damaged reviews and the contagion effect where one exit triggers the next are all real costs, but none of them can be estimated honestly without your trading data. The figure the calculator produces is therefore a floor — the least turnover is costing you, not the most.

Question 5

How do I reduce staff turnover in a pub, restaurant or hotel?

Accepted Answer

The interventions that move the number most are unglamorous: a structured onboarding that runs for 90 days rather than ending after week one, a manager who gives regular specific feedback, a visible route to the next role, and rotas published far enough ahead that people can plan a life around them. Pay helps at the margin but does not hold a team together on its own.

What is staff turnover actually costing you?

Your numbers, your result.

Read this before you quote the figure at anyone.

These are assumptions, not industry statistics.

It deliberately leaves out the expensive part.

The result is therefore a floor.

What is staff turnover actually costing you?

Your numbers, your result.

Read this before you quote the figure at anyone.

These are assumptions, not industry statistics.

It deliberately leaves out the expensive part.

The result is therefore a floor.

Once you know the number.

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