The math your turnover hides.

Ask an operations leader their hourly turnover rate and most can answer within a few points. Ask what it cost last year and the room gets quiet. Not because the number is unknowable—because nobody has multiplied it out.

The visible cost is the small one

Recruiting ads, screening, drug tests, orientation hours: that's the part that shows up in a budget line. Industry studies on hourly roles commonly put the full replacement cost between 16% and 40% of annual wages once you count the rest—the supervisor hours spent onboarding, the scrap and rework of week-two workers, the overtime paid to cover the empty seat, and the productivity gap between a leaver at full speed and a starter at half speed.

Run a simple version of the math. Two hundred hourly workers at $18 an hour is roughly $37,000 a year per seat. At 60% annual turnover, that's 120 exits. At even a conservative 25% replacement cost, the operation spends more than a million dollars a year replacing people it already had.

Why the number stays hidden

No single department owns it. Recruiting pays for ads, operations absorbs the slow weeks, finance sees overtime as a separate line, and quality eats the scrap. Spread across four budgets, a seven-figure problem reads as four manageable annoyances.

The pattern we see most often: turnover is treated as weather. It is treated as a market condition to endure rather than an output of specific, fixable inputs—screening quality, first-week experience, supervision, schedule design, and whether anyone is accountable for retention at all.

What to do with the number

First, calculate it honestly. Use your own wage, your own turnover rate, and a replacement percentage you believe. The point is not precision; the point is scale. A number you can defend changes the conversation from "staffing is expensive" to "what would cutting turnover in half be worth?"

Second, hold every workforce partner to it. If a vendor cannot tell you their retention rate at your site, on your shifts, against your scorecard, they are renting you the problem back. Retention is measurable. Demand the measurement.

We built a calculator that does the first part in about a minute, with the math shown and every assumption yours to change. The second part is a conversation.