Employee lifetime value applies the same logic marketing teams use for customer value to your workforce: net value generated per year, multiplied by how long someone typically stays. Plug in your own value and cost figures below for a directional estimate.
This uses a simplified model, annual value minus annual fully-loaded cost, multiplied by average tenure, deliberately left flexible on what “value” means for your business: revenue per employee, billable value, or an internal output measure, whichever is meaningful to you. More sophisticated ELTV models in HR analytics literature also discount future years and account for productivity ramp-up over an employee’s first months, which this tool doesn’t attempt. Use it to compare roles or teams against each other directionally, not as a precise financial valuation.
For revenue-generating roles, revenue attributable to that role is common. For support or internal roles, this is harder to define cleanly, some organizations use an internal output measure or simply skip ELTV for those roles.
It’s a direct multiplier, doubling average tenure roughly doubles the estimated lifetime value, which is why reducing turnover has an outsized effect on this number even without changing annual value or cost at all.
Use our Workforce Cost Calculator to work out a proper fully-loaded cost that includes more than just CTC, before bringing that figure into this tool.
No, treat this as a quick directional comparison tool, a genuine investment or headcount business case should use more rigorous, context-specific financial modeling.
If you don’t already have a reliable tenure figure, work backward from your Employee Turnover Calculator results over a few periods to estimate it.
No, that’s the cost of an exit; this is the value generated while someone stays. Our Cost of Turnover Calculator covers the exit-cost side separately.