Free tool
New-hire ramp cost calculator
What the gap between hiring someone and having them fully productive actually costs you in a year. Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Your numbers
$
Industry surveys put median time to productivity around 9 weeks, with complex roles running far longer.
Onboarding, shadowing, answering questions, reviewing early work.
$
The share of hires who leave or are exited within twelve months.
Ramp cost per hire
$4,976
$3,332 lost output plus $1,644 of manager time.
Failed hires per year
1.6
$7,962 of ramp investment written off and repeated.
Total annual ramp cost
$47,769
Across 8 hires plus 1.6 replacements. Excludes recruiting spend, which a faster ramp does not change.
If you took two weeks off the ramp
$10,615 a year
$1,106 per hire, and roughly 346 manager hours a year currently spent on onboarding that structured practice can absorb.
How this is calculated
Lost output assumes productivity climbs linearly from your week-one figure to 100 percent at the end of the ramp, so the average shortfall is the midpoint of those two numbers. That shortfall is applied to salary across the ramp period. Manager time is valued at the manager's fully loaded weekly rate divided across a 40-hour week.
Failed first-year hires are counted as one additional ramp cycle each, since the investment is written off and repeated. Recruiting and advertising spend is deliberately excluded, because faster ramp does not reduce it and including it would inflate the result.
The model is intentionally conservative. It does not price the customer-facing cost of an unprepared new hire, which is the part most owners actually care about and the hardest to quantify honestly.
The lever this model is sensitive to is readiness before live contact
Most of the ramp is a new hire learning conversations by having them badly. Practising those before the first customer contact is what moves both the ramp weeks and the attrition number.