For IT services and consulting businesses, employees between projects still cost money even though they aren’t generating billable revenue, and it’s a cost that rarely gets its own line item until someone goes looking for it. Here’s what your current bench is actually costing you each month, and as a share of total workforce.
The accuracy of this calculator depends entirely on the per-employee cost figure you enter. Using base salary alone will understate the real number, a proper fully-loaded figure should include CTC plus employer-side statutory contributions (PF, ESI or group insurance) and a share of workspace and tooling overhead. If you don’t already have that figure handy, work it out first with our Workforce Cost Calculator, then bring it back here.
Some bench time is genuinely unavoidable, notice periods, brief gaps between projects, training, and isn’t a sign of a problem by itself. The goal is usually to reduce avoidable bench time, not eliminate bench entirely.
Most organizations set an internal threshold, for example anyone unassigned for more than a set number of days, check your own definition since it affects what you should be counting here.
They’re two views of the same underlying issue, our Employee Utilization Rate Calculator gives you the percentage view, this one converts that gap into an actual rupee figure.
Many organizations exclude structured training from their bench definition since it’s a deliberate investment, not idle time, decide based on your own reporting needs.
This varies enormously by industry, business model, and how lumpy your project pipeline is, there’s no single external benchmark that applies universally, track your own trend over time instead.
A different tradeoff worth having numbers for, our Cost of Turnover Calculator prices out the alternative if bench time is being used to justify layoffs.