13 July 2026
What does filling one role in Europe actually cost?
A worked breakdown of what one European hire costs: the agency fee, loaded recruiter hours, the empty seat, and where a software subscription sits.
Filling one role in Europe is four bills, not one. On a EUR 80,000 salary filled in 45 days, the worked total is roughly EUR 31,000 through an agency and EUR 16,500 in house: a EUR 16,000 agency fee, about EUR 4,700 of recruiter and panel hours, and EUR 8,190 of empty seat that nobody invoices.
Most cost-per-hire numbers only count one bucket
People quote whichever bill arrives as an invoice, which is why the agency fee dominates every conversation. The other three are real money that never lands on a single line.
So separate them properly:
- Hard external spend. Agency fee, job board ads, assessments, referral bonus.
- Internal loaded cost. Recruiter hours plus hiring manager and panel hours, at a fully loaded rate.
- Cost of delay. Output forgone for every day the seat is empty.
- Mis-hire cost. The share of hires that do not work out, times what replacing them costs.
Buckets 1 and 2 are measurable. Buckets 3 and 4 are modelled, and every number in them is an assumption you choose.
Bucket 1. The agency fee
Contingency fees across Europe are a percentage of first-year gross salary. Hiring Hub’s guide to recruitment agency fees across Europe, updated in April 2025, gives these market ranges.
| Market | Typical contingency fee |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 15-20% |
| Spain | 15-20% |
| France | 20-25% |
| Germany | 15-30% |
| Italy | 20-30% |
For the Netherlands, HeadFirst’s guide to Dutch recruitment agency fees puts the usual band at 15-30 percent of gross annual salary, with mid-level professional roles at 15-20 percent and senior or hard-to-fill positions at 25-30 percent.
On EUR 80,000 that band runs from EUR 12,000 to EUR 24,000 for one placement, and retained search sits higher again. These are market ranges quoted by industry sources, not a statistical survey, so treat them as a negotiating start point rather than a benchmark.
Bucket 2. Internal time, loaded properly
Recruiter hours are usually costed at base salary divided by working hours, which understates them by a quarter to a third. Eurostat’s 2025 hourly labour cost figures, published 31 March 2026, put non-wage costs at 24.8 percent of total labour costs across the EU, rising to 32.3 percent in France and 31.7 percent in Sweden.
The same release puts average hourly labour cost at EUR 34.9 in the EU, EUR 47.9 in the Netherlands, EUR 51.7 in Denmark and EUR 12.0 in Bulgaria. Those are whole-economy averages for firms with 10 or more employees, a sanity check on your own rate rather than a substitute.
The calculation, stated as assumptions rather than facts.
| Input | Value | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Recruiter gross salary | EUR 65,000 | Assumption, matches the ROI calculator default |
| Loading for employer costs | +24.8% | Conservative. Eurostat’s 24.8% is a share of total labour cost, so a true markup on gross pay is nearer a third |
| Working hours per year | 1,760 (220 days) | Assumption |
| Loaded recruiter rate | EUR 46 per hour | Derived |
| Loaded hiring manager rate | EUR 60 per hour | Derived from an EUR 85,000 salary |
And the hours, for one mid to senior search run properly. Every line is a worked assumption, so replace them with your own timesheet.
| Activity | Recruiter hours |
|---|---|
| Intake, scorecard, kickoff | 3 |
| Sourcing and long-listing | 14 |
| Screening calls and notes | 14 |
| Scheduling and coordination | 8 |
| Hiring manager syncs and feedback chasing | 6 |
| Offer, negotiation, admin | 5 |
| Total | 50 |
Fifty recruiter hours at EUR 46 is EUR 2,300. Then add the panel: six candidates, two rounds, two interviewers, plus prep and debrief, is roughly 40 hours at EUR 60, or EUR 2,400. Internal cost for one hire lands near EUR 4,700.
Two things follow. The panel costs about as much as the recruiter, which is why sending unqualified candidates into a loop is expensive in a way no invoice shows. And using an agency does not remove this bucket, it halves the recruiter half and leaves the panel untouched.
Bucket 3. The empty seat
This is the bucket everyone omits, and usually the largest. It has no clean external source, because output forgone depends entirely on the role. For scale, Eurostat’s job vacancy statistics for the first quarter of 2026, published 16 June 2026, put the vacancy rate at 2.3 percent in the euro area and 2.1 percent in the EU, with the Netherlands highest at 4.0 percent.
For the cost, we do what our ROI calculator does: value an empty day as a fraction of the role’s own daily salary, and make you pick the fraction. Conservative is 50 percent, moderate 75 percent, realistic 100 percent. On EUR 80,000 over 220 working days, the daily salary is EUR 364.
| Days to fill | At 50% | At 75% | At 100% |
|---|---|---|---|
| 30 | EUR 5,460 | EUR 8,190 | EUR 10,920 |
| 45 | EUR 8,190 | EUR 12,285 | EUR 16,380 |
| 60 | EUR 10,920 | EUR 16,380 | EUR 21,840 |
At 45 days on the conservative setting, the empty seat already costs half an agency fee. On the realistic setting it costs more than one. This is a modelling choice, not a measurement: a support role and a revenue-carrying role do not lose the same amount per day.
Bucket 4. The mis-hire
Same rule: choose your assumption and label it. The calculator’s conservative mode assumes 10 percent of hires fail at a replacement cost of EUR 35,000, an expected EUR 3,500 spread across every hire. Its realistic mode uses 20 percent and EUR 65,000.
Before arguing about the percentage: SHRM’s 2025 Benchmarking Reports, published in October 2025, found only 20 percent of organisations track quality of hire at all. Most teams debating mis-hire rates are debating a number nobody measures. That is US data, so treat it as a prompt to start measuring rather than a European benchmark.
The worked example
One senior engineer, Amsterdam, EUR 80,000 gross, 45 days to fill, empty seat at 50 percent, mis-hire at the conservative setting. The agency fee is set at 20 percent, below the senior band quoted above, to keep the comparison conservative.
| Bucket | Via agency | In house |
|---|---|---|
| Hard external spend | EUR 16,000 fee | EUR 100 job marketing |
| Internal loaded time | EUR 3,550 (25 recruiter hours plus full panel) | EUR 4,700 (50 recruiter hours plus full panel) |
| Empty seat, 45 days | EUR 8,190 | EUR 8,190 |
| Expected mis-hire | EUR 3,500 | EUR 3,500 |
| Total | EUR 31,240 | EUR 16,490 |
Read it honestly. The agency route is not simply worse. If the agency has a warm bench and fills in 30 days instead of 45, the empty seat drops to EUR 5,460 and the gap narrows by about EUR 2,700. Speed is what the fee buys. The in-house route also assumes a recruiter with capacity, the assumption that quietly breaks in lean teams.
Where a subscription actually sits
Against those numbers, software pricing is almost a rounding error. Avery’s Free plan is EUR 0. Solo is EUR 299 per month, or EUR 299 per hire for a recruiter filling one role a month. In the example above that is under 2 percent of the agency fee and about 6 percent of the internal time cost. Team and Max are scoped on a call. Full detail is on pricing, and one thing to know before you compare: Solo does not include ATS import, export or integration, which sits on Team and Max.
So the subscription line is not the interesting number. The question is whether the tool moves the two big buckets, hours spent and days empty. Our working assumptions for Avery, stated openly on the ROI calculator, are 40 percent less sourcing and screening work and 50 percent faster time to fill. Those are assumptions, not audited outcomes, and the honest way to treat them is as a hypothesis to test on your own next three searches. What the software does to earn them is on the product pages.
Apply the same test to every line in your stack, from a LinkedIn Recruiter seat to your ATS: each one either reduces hours or reduces days, or it is a subscription you are paying to feel equipped.
What this comparison does not prove
It does not prove software is cheaper than an agency. They do different jobs, and plenty of roles justify a fee. Nor does it prove your numbers look like these: replace the salary, hours, days and the two modelled percentages with your own, and the ranking can flip. What it does show is where the money is. Two of the four buckets never reach finance, and they dominate the total. A team that tracks only invoiced spend is optimising the smallest number on the page.
The ROI calculator runs this maths with your own inputs, and the in-house team page covers hiring at volume. If your version of the table raises questions, book a call and we will go through it with you.