It's Not the Vacancy That's Costing You. It's the Turnover.

Everyone in this industry talks about the empty seat. The open Superintendent role nobody can fill, the Estimator req that's been live for two months, the PM position sitting vacant while a project slips. That's the visible cost, and it's real.

It's also not the number that should actually worry you.

The Construction Industry Institute found that a 10% increase in turnover on a project drives a 2.5% increase in total project labor costs. That's not the cost of the vacancy itself. That's what happens after you fill it, the ramp up time, the mistakes, the rework, the overtime covering the gap while the new person gets up to speed. The empty chair is a symptom. The turnover cascade behind it is where the real money goes.

The scale of the problem underneath the number

Ninety two percent of construction firms say they're having a hard time filling open positions right now, according to the Associated General Contractors of America's most recent workforce survey. Broken out by role type, 82% of firms report difficulty filling hourly craft positions and 80% report the same for salaried openings, according to the AGC and Sage 2026 industry outlook.

Leadership and specialized roles are taking longer to fill than almost anything else in the broader labor market. Industry benchmarking puts the average time to fill a general position across all industries somewhere between 45 and 68 days in 2026. For construction leadership roles specifically, Superintendents, PMs, and specialized technical positions like commissioning managers, that window commonly stretches to 60 to 90 days. Every one of those days is a day the remaining team is absorbing the workload of the missing person, which is exactly the mechanism behind the Construction Industry Institute's 2.5% labor cost number.

The workforce math behind all of this isn't temporary either. The industry needs an estimated 349,000 net new workers in 2026 just to keep pace, a number the Associated Builders and Contractors projects will climb to 456,000 in 2027 as spending accelerates. More than half of that 2026 figure is retirement replacement, not growth, and roughly one in five construction workers is already 55 or older. The people leaving aren't just quitting for a competitor. A large share of them are aging out permanently, which means every departure is harder to backfill with someone who already knows the job.

What turnover actually costs beyond the spreadsheet

The direct cost of recruiting and onboarding a replacement is the easy part to measure and the smallest part of the real bill. The expensive part sits underneath it, lost productivity during the vacancy itself, quality issues and rework from a less experienced person stepping into a role they're not fully ready for, and overtime paid to the remaining team just to keep the schedule from slipping further.

Shawn Gallant, COO at Columbia Construction, put it plainly in industry research on the topic, describing how the strain shows up as burnout, not just budget. Morale drops, people push themselves harder to compensate, and that pressure eventually shows up somewhere else entirely, safety incidents on the jobsite, according to the same reporting.

That's the part a line item for recruiting fees never captures. A turnover event doesn't cost you once. It costs you in the schedule, in the quality of the work, in the safety record, and in whether the rest of your team burns out and leaves too.

A story that shows exactly how this compounds

I talked with a Director of Construction earlier this year whose Superintendent left mid project, not because of performance, the person simply took a better offer elsewhere. The firm posted the role immediately, but the search stretched almost three months before they found someone qualified. In the meantime, the PM absorbed site supervision on top of an already full plate, subcontractors noticed the gap in oversight almost immediately, and two trade partners flagged quality issues that hadn't come up before. By the time the new Superintendent started, the project was carrying rework costs that hadn't existed under the original schedule, along with overtime the firm had paid out just to keep the timeline from collapsing entirely.

None of that shows up as "cost of turnover" on a monthly report. It shows up scattered across change orders, overtime lines, and a schedule that quietly slipped without anyone officially calling it a delay. That's exactly the invisibility the Construction Industry Institute's research is pointing at. The 2.5% isn't a rounding error. It's real money, just hidden in categories nobody labels as a hiring problem.

What this means for how you plan hiring

If your firm is only budgeting for the cost of a search when someone leaves, you're underpricing the actual event by a wide margin. The search fee and the new salary are the visible costs. The 2.5% labor cost increase for every 10 points of turnover is the number that should be showing up in how you think about retention, not just replacement.

That also changes the calculus on urgency. A search that drags to 60 or 90 days isn't just an inconvenience, it's a window where the remaining team is absorbing real cost, measurable in rework and overtime, whether or not anyone is tracking it that way. Speed in a search isn't a nice to have. It's a direct lever on the number the Construction Industry Institute is describing.

And if turnover on your team is running high, the fix isn't only sourcing faster replacements. It's understanding why people are leaving in the first place, since every departure now carries a bigger financial tail than it did when the labor market was looser and backfilling was faster.