Cost Per Hire Benchmarks for 2026
Two numbers published by the same organisation disagree by a factor of three. SHRM's 2025 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking data brief puts the median cost per hire for non executive roles at $1,200. SHRM's earlier Human Capital Benchmarking Report reported an average of $4,129. Both are accurate. This guide compiles cost per hire benchmarks from five published sources, shows where they conflict, and explains which number you should plan against.
Quick Answer
Published cost per hire benchmarks are not directly comparable, because each is reported in its own currency and market. SHRM puts the US median at $1,200 for non executive roles. CIPD puts the UK median at £1,500. Australia's 2021 peak reached A$23,860. Plan against the source for your own market.
What Is Cost Per Hire and How Is It Calculated?
Cost per hire is total recruiting spend divided by the number of hires made in the same period. The formula is simple:
Cost per hire = (internal recruiting costs + external recruiting costs) / total number of hires
What goes into those two buckets is where organisations diverge, and it is the main reason published figures disagree. SHRM's 2025 brief defines cost per hire as the sum of third party agency fees, advertising agency fees, job fair costs, online job board fees, employee referral costs, applicant and staff travel, relocation, recruiter pay and benefits, and talent acquisition system costs, divided by the number of hires. CIPD's 2024 Resourcing and Talent Planning Report uses a narrower definition covering in house resourcing time, advertising costs and agency or search fees.
Neither includes onboarding, training or time to productivity. Tellent Recruitee notes that under the SHRM and ANSI standard, cost per hire deliberately excludes post hire productivity, training costs and turnover losses, and that those belong in a separate analysis.
The practical consequence is that a company including hiring manager interview time will report a materially higher number than an identical company counting only job board spend and agency invoices. Before you compare yourself to any benchmark, write down which costs you are counting and keep that definition fixed across reporting periods.
Cost Per Hire Benchmarks in 2026: What the Data Says
| Source | Figure | Year | Sample / Scope |
|---|---|---|---|
| SHRM, 2025 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking | $1,200 median, non executive roles | 2025 | 2,371 US SHRM members, median values |
| SHRM, 2025 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking | $10,625 median, executive roles | 2025 | Same sample, median values |
| SHRM, Human Capital Benchmarking Report | $4,129 average, all hires | 2016, FY2015 data | Random sample of 2,048 SHRM members, mean |
| CIPD, Resourcing and Talent Planning Report | £1,500 median, employees | 2024 | 207 UK organisations, estimates accurate to plus or minus 20 percent |
| CIPD, Resourcing and Talent Planning Report | £2,000 median, senior managers and directors | 2024 | 246 UK organisations, same accuracy threshold |
| ELMO Software with AHRI, HR Industry Benchmark Report | A$23,860 average | 2022, 2021 data | Over 1,500 HR professionals across Australia and New Zealand |
| Tellent Recruitee worked example | €3,200 for a single hire | 2026 | Illustrative model, €2,400 internal plus €800 external |
The spread looks alarming until you separate the causes. The first is median against mean. SHRM's 2025 brief explicitly uses medians to avoid the distortion of extreme outliers, and states that the median is used to improve comparability across time periods given methodology changes since 2017. The 2016 report published an average. A small number of very expensive executive searches pulls a mean upward while leaving a median untouched, which alone explains most of the gap between $1,200 and $4,129.
The second is role seniority. SHRM's 2025 data puts executive cost per hire at $10,625 against $1,200 for non executive roles, a ratio of 8.9 to 1. In large and extra large organisations that ratio reaches 17.7 and 18.3 respectively. Any blended average across a hiring plan that includes senior roles will sit well above the non executive median.
The third is market timing and geography. The ELMO and AHRI figure of A$23,860 comes from the 2021 hiring peak, when the same survey recorded Australian time to hire rising from 33.4 days to 40 days and New Zealand from 36.5 to 50 days. It is a real number from a real survey of more than 1,500 HR professionals, but it describes an unusually hot market and a different question framing. Treat it as an upper bound, not a norm.
So the realistic planning range depends on which market you are in, and the figures should not be blended into a single range. UK organisations should plan against CIPD's 2024 medians of £1,500 for employees and £2,000 for senior managers and directors. US organisations should plan against a band running from SHRM's $1,200 median to its earlier $4,129 average, with your position inside that band set by how much internal recruiter and hiring manager time you count. Executive roles are a separate category in either market and should be budgeted in five figures.
Cost Per Hire by Sector
CIPD's 2024 report is the only source here that publishes a clean sector split, and it covers the UK only. For senior managers and directors, the 2024 median was £2,000 across all respondents, £2,000 in the private sector on a base of 194 organisations, £2,500 in the public sector on a base of 33, and £1,800 in the non profit sector on a base of 19.
For other employees, the picture reverses. The overall median was £1,500, with the private sector highest at £1,750 on a base of 159 organisations, the public sector at £1,000 on a base of 34, and the non profit sector at £600 on a base of 15.
CIPD itself urges caution on these comparisons, citing small sample sizes and high variation across organisations, partly attributable to different costs being included in different estimates. Bases of 15 to 34 organisations are too small to treat as authoritative. The direction of travel is more useful than the exact figure: public sector senior recruitment has become relatively more expensive, which CIPD links to the particular difficulty public bodies reported filling senior positions that year.
No source examined for this article published verified cost per hire figures broken down by industry such as technology, healthcare or retail. Several third party articles circulate industry tables, but none of the ones checked traced back to a primary report we could open and confirm, so they are omitted here rather than repeated.
Cost Per Hire by Company Size
None of the verified sources published cost per hire by company size directly. SHRM's 2025 brief does publish the ratio of executive to non executive cost per hire by size, and that gap widens sharply with scale: 17.7 to 1 in large organisations of 500 to 4,999 employees and 18.3 to 1 in extra large organisations of 5,000 or more, against 8.9 to 1 overall.
Two adjacent metrics from the same brief help explain why larger organisations spend more per senior hire. Recruiter workload rises steeply with size, from a median of 6 requisitions a year per recruiter at organisations under 100 employees to 22 at medium organisations, 50 at large and 60 at extra large. And time to fill is longest at extra large organisations, at 61 days for non executive and 60 days for executive positions against a 44 and 45 day median overall. Heavier caseloads and longer approval chains both cost money.
What Good Looks Like
Against SHRM's 2025 US medians, a non executive cost per hire materially below $1,200 suggests either an efficient direct sourcing operation or an incomplete cost definition. Check which before congratulating anyone.
For UK organisations, CIPD's 2024 medians of £1,500 for employees and £2,000 for senior managers are the closest published reference point, and both have fallen over time. The same table shows the senior manager median at £3,000 in 2022, £5,000 in 2020 and £8,000 in 2012, so a figure that would have looked efficient a decade ago now looks expensive.
The trend worth watching is the divergence SHRM identified. Non executive cost per hire fell 27 percent between 2017 and 2025, from $1,633 to $1,200, while executive cost per hire rose 113 percent over the same period, from $5,000 to $10,625. If your own numbers are moving in the same directions, you are tracking the market rather than failing.
One caution on optimisation. SHRM's 2025 data found that only 20 percent of organisations use any quality of hire measure, down from 27 percent in 2022. Driving cost per hire down without tracking what those hires are worth is a metric in isolation. Gallup's research on turnover puts the cost of replacing an individual employee at one half to two times their annual salary, and calls that a conservative estimate. A cheap hire who leaves inside a year costs more than an expensive one who stays.
How to Improve Your Cost Per Hire
- Fix your definition first. You cannot improve a number that changes meaning between quarters, so agree the cost categories and freeze them.
- Audit agency spend against direct sourcing. Third party fees are usually the largest single line and the easiest to renegotiate once you can show your own fill rates.
- Cut screening time, not screening depth. Manual CV review is recruiter salary, which sits inside the cost per hire formula in every definition examined here.
- Track cost per hire by source. A channel producing volume without hires is inflating both your spend and your recruiters' workload.
- Reduce avoidable candidate drop off. Every candidate lost late in the process means paying to source a replacement for a seat you had already filled once.
- Hire internally where you can. SHRM's 2025 data shows organisations overall filled 93 percent of non executive positions externally, which leaves substantial room for internal mobility at most employers.
For the mechanics of the calculation, see our guide to how to calculate cost per hire. For tactics, we have covered how to reduce cost per hire and the companion metric in time to hire benchmarks for 2026.
How We Compiled These Benchmarks
Every figure in this article was taken from a published third party source and checked against the original page or report. The sources are SHRM's 2025 Recruiting Executives Benchmarking data brief, SHRM's Human Capital Benchmarking Report, CIPD's 2024 Resourcing and Talent Planning Report, the ELMO Software HR Industry Benchmark Report produced with the Australian HR Institute, Tellent Recruitee's 2026 cost per hire guide, and Gallup's research on voluntary turnover.
These are aggregated from third party published research. They are not Klearskill's own hiring data and do not describe Klearskill users. Where a figure could not be traced to a primary source we could open and read, it was excluded, which is why this article contains no industry level breakdown. Compiled September 2026. Benchmark reports are typically published annually, so check each source for a newer edition before using these figures in a budget.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the average cost per hire in 2026?
There is no single figure. SHRM's 2025 benchmarking data puts the US median at $1,200 for non executive roles and $10,625 for executive roles. CIPD's 2024 report puts the UK median at £1,500 for employees and £2,000 for senior managers. The variation comes from median versus average, role seniority and which costs each survey counts.
Why do cost per hire benchmarks vary so much?
Three reasons. Medians and averages behave differently when a few executive searches cost tens of thousands. Definitions differ, with some surveys counting internal recruiter time and others only external spend. And market conditions move the number, as the 2021 Australian peak of A$23,860 shows against calmer years.
Is a low cost per hire always good?
No. Cost per hire measures spend, not outcome. SHRM found only 20 percent of organisations track quality of hire in 2025, down from 27 percent in 2022. Gallup estimates replacing an employee costs one half to two times their salary, so a cheap hire who leaves quickly is more expensive than the number suggests.
What is included in cost per hire?
SHRM's definition covers third party agency fees, advertising, job fair costs, job board fees, employee referral costs, applicant and staff travel, relocation, recruiter pay and benefits, and talent acquisition system costs. CIPD's narrower version covers in house resourcing time, advertising and agency or search fees. Neither includes onboarding or training.
How much does an executive hire cost compared to a standard role?
SHRM's 2025 data shows executive cost per hire at $10,625 against $1,200 for non executive roles, a ratio of 8.9 to 1. That gap is widest in the largest employers, reaching 17.7 to 1 in large organisations and 18.3 to 1 in extra large ones. Executive costs rose 113 percent between 2017 and 2025.
Has cost per hire gone up or down?
It depends on the role. SHRM recorded a 27 percent fall in non executive cost per hire between 2017 and 2025, and a 113 percent rise for executives. CIPD's UK series shows a long term decline, with the senior manager median falling from £8,000 in 2012 to £2,000 in 2024.
How do I benchmark my own cost per hire fairly?
Pick one definition, apply it consistently, and split your reporting between executive and non executive roles before comparing to anything external. Then track your own trend over several quarters. Your own direction of travel is a more reliable signal than a single external benchmark drawn from a different market and methodology.
Screen Every CV Automatically, From $10 a Month
Recruiter time sits inside every cost per hire definition on this page, and manual CV review is where most of it goes. Klearskill screens every CV with AI on a flat monthly plan, with unlimited active jobs, unlimited candidates and no per seat charges. Starter is $10 a month with your own AI provider key, Pro is $50 a month with the AI included. Start free with one job and 25 CVs, no card needed.