Vacancy rate is a simple snapshot, open positions as a share of your approved headcount, but it’s an easy number to lose track of when hiring is happening across multiple teams at once. This calculator works it out from your approved and filled position counts.
This tells you how much of your approved headcount is currently unfilled at a point in time, it doesn’t tell you how long those positions have been open. A high vacancy rate could mean your hiring process is slow, or it could mean a hiring freeze has paused fulfillment against roles that were approved for a different budget period. Pair this with our Time-to-Hire Calculator to see whether the gap is a hiring-speed problem or an approved-headcount problem.
This varies significantly by industry, growth stage, and how frequently headcount gets approved versus filled, there’s no single external benchmark that applies across all organizations, track your own trend instead.
Most organizations count them as open until an offer is accepted, since the role isn’t actually generating output yet, but define this consistently for your own tracking.
Vacancy rate tells you the current gap; our Headcount Planning Calculator helps you plan forward, factoring in both replacement hires and net-new growth roles.
Not necessarily, it could also mean approved headcount hasn’t been reviewed in a while relative to actual business need, a consistently perfect number is sometimes worth a second look rather than taken at face value.
A persistently high vacancy rate is often a good moment to check whether your Recruitment Cost Calculator budget matches the pace you actually need to hire at.