What voluntary turnover really costs in Spain in 2026

Voluntary turnover in Spain costs, depending on the profile, between half and close to twice the annual salary per person who leaves. In mid-market companies, structural turnover runs around 24% in 2025 according to getManfred and Xataka, and 74.8% of voluntary exits are pay-driven according to Adecco/Randstad. Add up replacement, the productivity curve and knowledge loss, and a single regrettable exit in a 500-person company easily reaches six figures. The recruiter invoice is the least of it. The expensive part comes afterward: how the team scrambles to reorganize when the person who quietly held half the operation together is gone.

Here's how to calculate the real cost of an exit in 2026, what market data you can lean on, and why the usual KPIs (% of exits, time-to-fill) push you toward bad decisions when you don't cross them with each person's real impact on the network.

The state of voluntary turnover in Spain, 2025-2026

Public data paints an uncomfortable picture. The Adecco-Randstad 2025 survey places structural voluntary turnover above 24% and records that three out of four exits (74.8%) have a declared pay reason. The ICP sectors that consult Beetrics most confirm the figures from the top:

• Food industry: operator turnover between 25-35% annually according to FIAB sector reports, with peaks in maintenance and night shifts.
• Hospitality: up to 75% of workers have actively looked to change jobs in recent months according to Preferente. In some segments, annual turnover runs 70-80%.
• Technology: voluntary turnover of 24.1% in 2025 according to getManfred and Xataka, with peaks of 25-30% in consulting and 15-20% in product.

If your organization sits below 15%, what you need is to protect that floor. If it stays above 20% for two consecutive years, it is already a margin issue, not an HR topic, and the CFO or executive committee typically catches it sooner than expected.

How to calculate the real cost per exit

The formula we use at Beetrics combines three blocks. The first is direct and easy to defend to the CFO. The other two are the ones almost nobody bothers to quantify, and they're the ones that weigh the most.

1. Direct cost (what the CFO already knows)

Recruiting (headhunter fee or internal team cost), formal onboarding (training, IT equipment, administrative setup), manager time for selection. For a qualified mid-market profile, this typically runs 15-30% of annual salary. It is the line that shows up on the budget.

2. Productivity ramp-up (the hidden cost)

A new hire takes between 4 and 9 months to reach the productivity of the person they replace, according to the classic Boushey & Glynn meta-analysis (Center for American Progress). During that time, the team absorbs part of the load, quality drops temporarily and projects slip. Added up, it usually represents an additional 50-100% of annual salary.

3. Knowledge and network loss (the cost that really hurts)

When a knowledge holder leaves (someone with 10+ years of tenure who concentrates historical context, internal contacts or client relationships), the real replacement cost can approach twice the annual salary. And a good part of that cost never shows up on an invoice: errors that weren't made before, decisions now taken half-blind, and sometimes more exits behind them, because that person was the one keeping the team connected.

Why traditional KPIs lie

Absolute % turnover is the figure that ends up in annual reports and the one that drives the worst decisions. A company with 18% turnover where 80% are regrettable exits (key profiles) is in much worse shape than one with 22% where 70% are desirable turnover (low performance, culture misfit, functional exits).

Same thing with time-to-fill. Filling a critical vacancy in 30 days is excellent if the replacement is equivalent, and catastrophic if the new profile will take 9 months to absorb the context the departing person had internalized.

That is why at Beetrics we advocate three metrics that are more useful than the absolute %:

• Regrettable turnover: % of exits the company would have wanted to retain.
• Net knowledge loss: estimate of how long it will take the network to recover the information flow broken by an exit.
• Concentration risk: how many people, if they left, would bring down three or more critical relationships. They're the knowledge holders who keep the network standing without showing up on the org chart.

How Beetrics helps you act before they leave

Counter-offers work less than people think. According to Hays, they retain 50% of people at year one but only 20% at year two. What actually changes the outcome is intervening before the decision is made, and that means catching signals an annual survey never picks up.

That is the space Beetrics covers through organizational network analysis (ONA): detecting who each person is consulting less than before, which connections have cooled and where the external network that precedes an exit is being built. In the pre-resignation signals your team is ignoring we develop the seven patterns we keep seeing in cases of key figures who end up resigning.

If you want to see how this is measured and how it fits each sector, see our specific guides on the methodology behind Beetrics and the comparison with broader engagement platforms.

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