Tool · Hiring
The req has been open for months and nobody has priced it
Fill in the role and the months open. This page returns four things.
- How far past the market hiring time you are
- The capacity the empty seat did not deliver
- What you have already spent looking and covering
- How a contract rate you are weighing compares to the loaded cost of the hire
Sources at the bottom. Nothing is stored and nothing is sent.
An open technical role costs the salary you are not paying, plus the capacity the seat does not deliver, plus what you spend looking and covering. This calculator puts a figure on all three from five cited role families, and shows how far past the published hiring median the req has run.
Step 1. The role
Whole months since the req went live.
Prefilled from the published median. Change it to yours.
Step 2. What you are already spending
All three are optional. Leave them blank and the rest of the result still works.
Hourly. Fills the comparison column.
Agency fees and job boards.
Overtime and stopgap contractors.
What an employee costs above base salary. BLS puts benefits at 31.5% of total compensation.
Ashby: 75 technical, 52 junior, 63 mid, 71 senior.
2,080 divided by 12.
Used to count the sprints the seat was absent for.
Your result
Showing the published defaults. Change anything above and these numbers move.
108
days past the published median for a technical role
13
sprints without the seat
$0
your own spend to date
$16,544
loaded cost a month once hired
Against the published median
How long this has taken, against how long the market takes.
Capacity not delivered
What the empty seat did not produce, counted in time. One block is one sprint.
One seat, and no claim about the rest of the team.
Your own spend
What has already left, from the figures you entered.
Nothing entered in Step 2, so there is nothing to total here.
Two ways to cover it
Keep searching, or take the rate on the table.
Keep searching
The rate on the table
Add a rate in Step 2 to fill this column.
One is an employee with benefits and a ramp. The other is contracted capacity. The columns compare cost only.
- Copy my results gives you your figures, the sources behind them, and a link back to this exact result. For sending to a CFO.
- Share the tool gives you a clean link with none of your figures in it, so whoever opens it starts from the defaults and puts in their own.
Does this calculator send my numbers anywhere?
No. The arithmetic runs in your browser. Nothing is written to a server and Perform receives none of the figures you type.
Copy my results puts your figures on your clipboard with the sources behind them and a link back to this exact result. Share the tool gives a clean link with none of your figures in it, so whoever opens it starts from the defaults.
What counts as the cost of an open role?
Three things, and this page keeps them separate. The capacity the empty seat did not deliver, counted in sprints. What you have already spent on the search and on covering the work. And the loaded monthly cost once somebody is hired, which is the figure a CFO compares against a contract rate.
Every default here is published and dated. Where a figure is your own, the page says so and leaves it at zero until you fill it in.
| Role families | Five, each with a cited salary median |
|---|---|
| Where the calculation runs | In your browser |
| What reaches Perform | Nothing |
| Time to a result | About a minute |
| Cost | Free. No account, no email address, no form |
| Sources behind the defaults | US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Stack Overflow developer survey, ManpowerGroup talent shortage survey |
Get a second read on the number
Send it over. We have been watching why these reqs stay open since 2005.
Sources
Every figure the tool supplies traces to a source here. Every figure you type stays yours.
- Loaded cost 1.46. BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026. Wages $53.50 of $78.10 an hour. Link
- 75 days to fill. Ashby 2026 Talent Trends Report, 54 million applications, 93,000 jobs. Ashby sells hiring software. Link
- Government salary medians, May 2025. Software developers $135,980, QA analysts and testers $104,300, database administrators and architects $126,760, computer programmers $100,390. Link
- Self-reported medians. Stack Overflow 2025 Developer Survey, 5,239 US salary respondents. AI or ML $189,500, data engineer $150,000, back-end $175,000, full-stack $138,000, enterprise applications $128,000. Link
- Two families use a proxy. No government code exists for data engineer, AI or ML engineer, or legacy modernization. Data uses database administrators, legacy uses computer programmers, and AI runs on the self-reported figure alone.
- Time to fill elsewhere. Greenhouse 59.67 days, SHRM 39 days. Both cover all roles, not technical roles.
- Coverage spend. No published research measures what an open seat costs the people absorbing the work, so that field has no default.
- Contract rates. No default is prefilled. There is no authoritative published US bill rate table.