Employer benchmarkUpdated September 2026

Average Cost Per Hire by Industry (2026 Benchmarks)

SHRM's 2025 benchmarking put the mean cost per hire at $5,475 for nonexecutive roles and $35,879 for executives — but the median nonexecutive hire in the same survey cost $1,200. Both numbers are correct, they come from the same 2,371 responses, and the gap between them is the single most important thing to understand before you compare your own figure to anything on this page. Industry averages sit between roughly $1,070 and $6,464 depending on the sector, and they are means, which means they carry the same skew.

Why published numbers run from about $1,200 to $5,475

The two figures are the median and the mean of the same distribution. The mean is more than four and a half times the median, which tells you the shape: most hires are cheap and a small number of hard, senior or heavily screened hires are very expensive, and they drag the average a long way from what a typical hire costs.

Two practical consequences. First, if you are a frontline employer filling hourly roles in volume, the median is the number that describes you and the mean is the number that describes a mixed workforce including senior hires. Second, when a vendor or an article quotes "the average cost per hire" without saying whether it is a mean or a median, it is not a figure you can act on. The formula behind all of these is the same and it is set out on our cost per hire page.

The by-industry table

These are the industry figures that circulate most widely, drawn from SHRM Benchmarking Services and republished in a workforce glossary updated in December 2025. They are means, so the skew described above applies to every row.

Industry rows: SHRM Benchmarking Services figures as published in a workforce glossary updated 19 December 2025. Aggregate rows: SHRM press release announcing the 2025 benchmarking reports, 15 October 2025, from a survey of 2,371 SHRM members fielded 9 January to 3 March 2025. All read at source 9 September 2026.

What a good cost per hire is

There is no threshold that makes a cost per hire good, and any article that gives you one is guessing. What there is instead are three tests, all of which you can run against your own number.

• Is it stable? A figure that moves 40% between quarters is usually measuring a changing boundary rather than a changing process. Fix the boundary first.
• Is it cheaper than the alternative? The only comparison that pays is against what you would otherwise do: an agency placement fee at 15–30% of first-year salary, or the cost of the seat staying open. Everything else is trivia.
• Does it hold when you look at retention? Cost per hire falls when screening stops. If it drops while ninety-day turnover rises, you did not save anything.

If you want a single orienting number rather than three tests: for frontline hourly hiring, a cost per hire in the low four figures is ordinary, and the $1,200 median is a better anchor than the $5,475 mean. Above about $5,000 for an hourly role, something specific is happening — agency use, a thin market, or an internal cost you have started counting that you did not count before.

The industries frontline employers ask about

Cost per hire in healthcare and for nurses

Healthcare and social services averages $4,770 in the SHRM industry figures, near the middle of the table — which understates the problem, because the average blends administrative roles with licensed clinical ones. What we can measure directly is the front of the funnel, and there the spread inside healthcare is enormous: a caregiver or home care applicant costs a $3.76 median in our 2026 data, a CNA $7.72, an LPN $12.77, a registered nurse $19.08, and a physical, occupational or speech therapist $74.62. The scarcity is real and it shows up in the advertising line long before it shows up in a cost per hire.

Cost per hire in manufacturing

Manufacturing averages $3,497, the second lowest industry in the table. That is consistent with what we see at the front of the funnel: warehouse and production applicants run a $9.83 median with a 20% apply rate, one of the healthier conversion rates in our data. Manufacturing hiring is usually a volume problem rather than a scarcity problem, which is why it responds well to advertising and badly to agency fees.

Cost per hire for truck drivers

Trucking sits inside "wholesale trade, retail trade, transportation and warehousing" at $4,705 in the industry table, which is not a useful figure for a carrier because the category is mostly not drivers. The measurable part is stark: a CDL truck driver applicant costs a $26.86 median in our 2026 data, against an 8% apply rate and a 0.88% click-through rate — roughly double the cost of a warehouse applicant and among the hardest audiences we advertise to. A driver cost per hire built on that front end will sit well above the category average.

Cost per hire in hospitality and retail

Accommodation and food service, with arts and recreation, is the cheapest row in the table at $1,070, and retail sits inside the $4,705 wholesale and retail row. Our own retail and corporate sector runs the cheapest applicants we measure — an $8.58 median with a 26% apply rate. The economics here are about volume and speed rather than cost: the cost of a vacancy usually exceeds the cost of the hire, which is the argument the employee cost calculator makes in dollars.

What we can measure: cost per applicant by sector, and the bridge

Everything above is somebody else's survey. Here is the part we measure ourselves, from 891 Boostpoint-managed campaigns and 1,334 campaign-months in 2026, published in full on the 2026 social job advertising benchmark.

Cost per applicant and apply rate: 891 Boostpoint-managed Meta campaigns, 1,334 campaign-months, 2026; costs are what advertisers paid, inclusive of campaign management, and cover advertising only. The final column is an estimate, not a measurement.

Read that last column carefully, because it is the only number on this page we constructed rather than found. The assumption is twenty applicants per hire, and it is ours, not yours. How many applicants it takes to make one hire depends on your screening, your interview show rate and your offer acceptance — all of which happen after the click, in systems we do not see. Put your own ratio in and the arithmetic changes completely; at ten applicants per hire the healthcare figure halves, at forty it doubles. We do not publish a cost per hire from advertising data, and we say why on the cost per hire calculator.

What the bridge is useful for is proportion. Even at the pessimistic end, the advertising line is a few hundred dollars against a published cost per hire of several thousand. Whatever is making a frontline cost per hire expensive, it is usually not the advertising.

Year over year: what has actually changed

Three points on a decade-long line, all from the same organization's benchmarking programme:

The mean has risen about a third across a decade, which is roughly in line with wage growth rather than ahead of it. But the more useful observation is that only the 2025 release publishes a median alongside the mean, and the moment it did, the headline number stopped looking like a typical hire. If you have been benchmarking against $4,129 or $4,700 for years, you have been comparing your frontline hiring to an average that includes executive search.

Frequently asked questions

The cost of recruiting: the whole bill, not just the hire

Cost per hire is one line of a larger number. When people ask what recruiting costs, they usually mean the total annual bill, and it has five parts. Four of them are invisible on any invoice, which is why the answer people give is almost always too low.

A recruiting budget you can build in five minutes

Work forward from hires rather than backward from a percentage of payroll. The arithmetic is: hires needed × applicants per hire × cost per applicant. The first number comes from last year's separations, the third is in the table on this page, and the middle one you have to measure — it varies far too much by role and by screening standard for anyone else's figure to be useful.

A worked illustration for a warehouse operation that needs twelve hires a year. Suppose it takes eight applicants to make one hire (measure your own; this is an assumption, not a benchmark). Twelve hires × eight applicants is 96 applicants. At the warehouse and production median of $9.83, that is about $944 for the year in advertising — roughly $80 a month. If the same employer's apply rate is poor and it takes twenty applicants per hire at $18 each, the same twelve hires cost $4,320. Same seats, same market, four and a half times the money, and the difference is almost entirely the application form and the speed of the first reply.

Where recruiting spend sits against everything else, and which metrics are worth tracking against it, is on hiring metrics benchmarks. The annual planning version — forecast, channel mix, owners — is on talent acquisition strategy.

Two neighbours to this page: the formula and a worked example live on cost per hire, and the tool that runs your own figure under three definitions at once is the cost per hire calculator, and the nine levers for bringing your own figure down are ranked on how to reduce cost per hire.