Turnover Rate Calculator

What this turnover rate calculator does

Twelve people left last year. Whether that is a crisis or a rounding error depends entirely on how many people you have, and turnover rate is how you turn one into the other.

Give this calculator the number of people who left and your headcount, and it returns the percentage. There is a dropdown at the top: leave it on No if you already know your average headcount, or switch it to Yes and the tool will work the average out from your opening and closing numbers.

The arithmetic is a single division. What makes turnover worth thinking about carefully is that the same percentage can describe a healthy business shedding people who were never going to fit and a failing one bleeding its best staff, and the number cannot tell those apart. The split that can is further down.

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How to use it

1. Calculate average number of employees? Set to Yes if you want the tool to average your opening and closing headcount. Leave on No if you already have an average figure.
2. On Yes: employees at the beginning of the period and at the end.
3. On No: your average number of employees across the period.
4. Number of employees who left. Separations during the period, from any cause.

Press Calculate. Press Reset to clear it.

Two practical notes. Pick a period and keep everything inside it, because a year of departures against a month of headcount is meaningless. And the tool needs at least one departure to calculate, so a period with perfect retention cannot currently be recorded. If nobody left, your turnover rate was zero, which is worth writing down somewhere even if the calculator will not say it for you.

The formula, and why the average matters

Turnover rate = (employees who left ÷ average number of employees) × 100

And where the tool works out the average for you:

Average employees = (headcount at the beginning + headcount at the end) ÷ 2

The averaging is not fussiness. Departures happen throughout a period while headcount is a snapshot, and a growing or shrinking business will get a materially different answer depending on which snapshot it uses.

A company that began the year with 140 people and ended with 160, losing 12 along the way:

More than a full percentage point between the highest and lowest, on the same twelve departures. The average sits in the middle and is the convention, which is also what the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses when it publishes national separation rates.

For a business whose headcount swings a lot within the year, averaging monthly figures rather than just the two endpoints gives a better answer still. Add the twelve month-end headcounts, divide by twelve, and enter that.

A worked example

A company averaging 150 employees, with 12 departures over the year.

12 ÷ 150 × 100 = 8.00 percent

So roughly one in twelve of the workforce left during the year. A few more for scale:

Notice the last row. Three people leaving a forty person company produces almost the same rate as twelve leaving a hundred and fifty person one. That is the ratio doing its job, and it is also why small organisations see their rate jump around alarmingly from year to year on very few actual events. One extra departure in a team of twenty moves the rate five points.

Voluntary and involuntary are different problems

A single turnover figure lumps together things that have nothing in common. The Bureau of Labor Statistics splits separations three ways, and the split is worth borrowing.

Quits are voluntary, initiated by the employee. This is the number that measures whether people want to stay, and the BLS describes the quits rate specifically as a measure of workers' willingness or ability to leave their jobs. If one figure is going to tell you something about your organisation, it is this one.

Layoffs and discharges are involuntary, initiated by the employer. These say something about the business, or about hiring decisions made a year ago, rather than about how it feels to work there.

Other separations covers retirement, death, disability, and transfers to other locations of the same company. Largely outside anyone's control and worth excluding before drawing conclusions.

Why it matters: a company that made ten redundancies and lost two people to resignation has the same headline turnover as one that made no redundancies and lost twelve people voluntarily. Those are opposite situations. The first has a business problem it already knows about, the second has a retention problem it may not.

So run the calculation three times, once for each category, and track all three. It costs nothing beyond sorting the list, and the quits line on its own is more informative than the total ever is.

One further cut worth making: turnover in the first year of employment. High early turnover points at hiring or onboarding rather than at the job itself, and it is expensive because the recruitment cost has not been recovered.

What the national figures actually look like

The Bureau of Labor Statistics runs the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, which publishes monthly separation rates across the whole United States economy. As of the most recent preliminary figures, for May 2026:

Those are monthly rates, which is the single most misread thing about JOLTS data. A 3.2 percent monthly separation rate is not a 3.2 percent annual one, and people quoting it as though it were are understating national turnover by roughly a factor of twelve.

Two things to take from the table. Quits run at roughly two thirds of all separations in an ordinary labour market, so most turnover is people choosing to leave rather than being asked to. And hires slightly exceeding separations is what a growing economy looks like; when that reverses, employment is falling.

Industry matters enormously. Accommodation and food services runs turnover several times higher than government or manufacturing, and neither figure is a judgement on the employers. So the useful comparison is your own sector and your own history rather than the national average, and JOLTS publishes by industry for exactly that reason.

Turning a monthly rate into an annual one

If you track turnover monthly and want a yearly figure, there are two ways to do it and they answer different questions.

Adding the months up. Twelve months at 2 percent gives 24 percent. This is the standard approach and it is what an annual turnover rate normally means: total departures across the year, over average headcount. It can exceed 100 percent, and in high churn sectors it routinely does, because a single post can turn over several times.

Compounding the survival rate. If 2 percent leave each month, the share of the original workforce still present after twelve months is 0.98 to the power of twelve, which is 78.5 percent. So 21.5 percent of the people who started the year have gone.

Both are correct and they mean different things. The first counts events, the second counts people. The gap between 24 and 21.5 comes from the fact that some of the departures in later months are people who joined during the year, and they were never part of the original group.

For most purposes the first is what you want, because it is what everyone else reports and it is what the cost of turnover attaches to. The second is more useful when you are asking how stable a particular team actually is.

Questions people ask

How do I calculate employee turnover rate?

Divide the number who left by average headcount and multiply by 100. Twelve departures across an average of 150 people is 8 percent.

What is a good turnover rate?

Entirely sector dependent. Hospitality runs many times higher than government, and neither is evidence of good or bad management. Compare against your own industry and your own trend.

Which headcount should I use?

The average across the period. Using the opening or closing figure can shift the answer by more than a percentage point in a growing business.

Nobody left this month. What do I enter?

Your turnover rate was zero. The calculator needs at least one departure, so that particular result has to be recorded by hand.

Should I count redundancies?

In a total turnover figure, yes. But track voluntary and involuntary separately as well, because they point at completely different problems. See the section above.

My rate is monthly. How do I annualise it?

Add the twelve monthly rates for the conventional annual figure. To find what share of the original workforce has gone, compound the survival rate instead. See the section above.

Can turnover exceed 100 percent?

Yes, and in high churn sectors it regularly does. It means the number of departures over the year exceeded average headcount, which happens when the same position turns over repeatedly.

References

A note on sourcing and dates. The national separation, quits and hires rates quoted above come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey and are monthly rather than annual figures. The most recent values cited are preliminary estimates for May 2026, and JOLTS revises five years of data each January, so anyone using these for comparison should check the current release rather than relying on a figure quoted on a page like this one.

1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. https://www.bls.gov/jlt/
2. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, JOLTS Latest Numbers. https://www.bls.gov/jlt/latest-numbers.htm
3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/jolts.nr0.htm