Connext Global says vacant roles cost USD $14,700 a month

Connext Global has published research estimating that an unfilled critical role costs companies $14,700 a month. The findings are based on a survey of 750 U.S. full-time employees involved in hiring decisions or budget oversight.

The report highlights a gap between how employers experience vacancies and how they measure them. At the estimated monthly rate, a vacant role would cost about $176,400 over a year. Yet many leaders said their organisations do not formally track the impact through lost productivity, overtime, or other knock-on effects.

One in five leaders said their organisation does not track the true cost of a vacancy at all. Another 29% said they review it only informally, while 15% said they do not know what unfilled positions are costing each month.

Only 33% said their organisation calculates lost productivity directly, and 35% said they track overtime linked to an open role. The data suggests many finance and leadership teams are managing vacancies without a full cost baseline.

Operational strain

The survey found that open roles often shift pressure onto existing staff. In 47% of cases, leaders said a manager or executive had personally stepped in to do the work of an unfilled role. Meanwhile, 57% said the extra workload mainly fell on a manager or one or two employees rather than being spread across a team.

That strain appears to contribute to service and retention problems. Some 46% of respondents said an unfilled role had slowed response times to customers or clients, while 41% said a prolonged vacancy had directly led to another employee resigning. Another 39% said they hadn't seen that happen yet but worried it might.

Business performance was also affected. Two-thirds of leaders, or 66%, said their organisation had either definitely lost a customer, client, or piece of business because a role stayed open too long, or suspected that had happened but could not confirm it.

The report also suggests vacancy effects can emerge quickly. Twenty-two per cent of leaders said team performance suffers within the first two weeks of a role being open, and 39% said the effect appears after about a month. Even so, 37% said their longest vacancy in the past year lasted three months or more.

Hiring trade-offs

Employers also reported tension between waiting for the right candidate and making a poor hire under pressure. More than half of respondents (52%) said hiring the wrong person quickly and leaving a critical role vacant for months cost about the same over time.

Nearly a quarter (24%) said they hired someone they knew wasn't right for a role simply to relieve the pressure of a prolonged vacancy and later regretted it. Only 11% said the vacancy alone was worse than a rushed bad hire.

The findings also pointed to a contradiction in employer behaviour. Thirty per cent of leaders said they would accept a higher cost per hire to remove the pressure caused by open roles, yet only 13% said they would consider offshore or nearshore staffing when a position remained unfilled.

At the same time, 48% said they would consider offshore or nearshore talent only as a last resort or would not consider it at all, even after a prolonged domestic search. Just 17% said nothing would change their mind, while 25% said their organisation had simply never considered offshore or nearshore staffing.

Cost comparison

The report compared the vacancy estimate with broader pay levels to show the scale of the issue. Based on a median monthly earnings of $5,352 for a full-time U.S. worker, one month of vacancy cost is roughly equal to nearly 2.75 months of median pay.

That comparison suggests some companies may focus on the visible cost of widening a search while underestimating the cost of leaving a post unfilled. For finance teams, the question is whether they treat vacancy cost as a live operating metric or leave it as an informal human resources estimate.

Tim Mobley, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Connext Global, said the burden often appears first in day-to-day operations rather than in formal reporting.

"Every open seat has a cost attached to it, whether a company measures it or not," Mobley said. "The teams absorbing that gap are the ones who pay for it first, long before it shows up in a budget review. Solving it faster, including with offshore or nearshore talent, protects the people already doing the job as much as it protects the bottom line."