Cost of a Bad Hire Calculator
A line-item calculator for small businesses. Enter what you actually spend to hire, train, and replace someone, and see the total next to the cost of a $5 background report.
- Itemized bad-hire cost
- Months of salary equivalent
- Comparison to screening cost
Defaults are an example only. Replace each number with what your business actually spends.
Hiring
Job ads, agency or referral fees.
What happened
Versus a good hire, while in the role.
Severance, legal review, final pay costs.
Theft, damage, refunds, lost accounts.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to PreHireBadge or saved.
Cost of this bad hire
$8,900
Months of salary
2.5
Total cost ÷ monthly salary
| Recruiting spend (first hire) | $600 |
| Manager time hiring (first hire) | $750 |
| Onboarding and training | $1,500 |
| Lost productivity while in role | $4,200 |
| Separation costs | $500 |
| Incident losses | $0 |
| Re-hiring (recruiting + manager time again) | $1,350 |
The same money buys 1,780 PreHireBadge reports at $5 each. A background check covers one risk, an undisclosed record relevant to the job; pair it with structured interviews and references.
Screen your next hire for $5. The candidate completes the invite on their phone.
Run a $5 reportWhy you'd use this
When a hire does not work out, the cost is more than the paychecks. There is the money and time spent recruiting, the onboarding and training, the work that did not get done well, the cost of separating, any incidents along the way, and then doing the whole hiring process again.
Rather than using a generic percentage of salary, this calculator itemizes those costs with your own numbers, so the total reflects your business.
In your browser, nothing saved
Using it
- 1
Enter hiring costs
Recruiting spend, hours spent hiring, and what an hour of your time is worth.
- 2
Enter what happened
Months in the role, productivity gap, separation costs, and any incident losses.
- 3
See the total
An itemized total, months-of-salary equivalent, and how many $5 reports it would buy.
Where screening fits
A background check addresses one specific risk, an undisclosed record that is relevant to the job. It does not predict performance. Use this calculator to understand the whole cost of a mis-hire, and treat screening as one inexpensive control among several, alongside structured interviews and reference checks.
Questions people ask about this
What is the average cost of a bad hire?
Widely repeated figures vary and are often hard to trace to a source. Your own numbers are more useful, which is why this calculator itemizes them.
What should I include in lost productivity?
The share of a good hire's output you did not get while the person was in the role, valued at their salary.
Is my data saved?
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser.
Pairs well with
Background Check Cost Calculator
Annual screening spend at $5 a check versus the per-check price you are paying now.
Open toolTrust & Safety Loss Estimator
Estimate what safety incidents cost your marketplace, using your own assumptions, against $5 a check.
Open toolConditional Offer Letter Generator
An offer letter contingent on a background check, with fair-chance-friendly language.
Open toolOne $5 report is cheap insurance
PreHireBadge runs an identity-verified national criminal employment report for $5 flat, no subscription. The candidate completes the invite on their phone; you read a plain-language report.