Most headcount plans budget for growth and quietly forget replacement hiring. If your team has any attrition at all, a chunk of your recruiting capacity next year is already spoken for before a single new role gets added. This calculator splits the two apart so neither gets lost in the total.
Say a 100-person team plans 15% growth and expects 12% attrition over the coming year. The naive read is “we’re hiring 15 people.” The actual number is 27: 15 net-new roles for growth, plus 12 replacement hires just to stay at the current headcount before growth even starts. Teams that plan only against the growth number consistently under-resource recruiting and then wonder why time-to-fill creeps up mid-year.
The productivity improvement input exists for the case where a process change, a new tool, or an automation project genuinely changes how many people a given amount of work requires. It is easy to overestimate this figure to make a headcount ask look smaller; use it only where you have a specific, defensible reason to expect a productivity shift, not as a rounding lever.
Historical attrition over the last 12 months is usually the more defensible starting point unless you have a specific reason to expect it to shift, such as a known restructuring or a wave of retirements. Our Employee Turnover Calculator and Attrition Rate Calculator can help you calculate that baseline from your own separation data first.
Once you know how many hires you need, our Recruitment Cost Calculator converts that into a channel-by-channel budget, and our Cost Per Hire Calculator gives you the standard SHRM benchmark to sanity-check it against.
This tool treats headcount as whole people. If your plan mixes full-time, part-time, and contract roles, convert everything to a common unit first using our FTE Calculator before running the numbers here.
You can enter 0% growth and treat the replacement-hire figure as your effective hiring cap, since in a downsizing scenario you likely will not be backfilling every departure. See our guide to workforce planning for how to think through headcount reduction scenarios more broadly.