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What does caregiver turnover actually measure?

Less than the figures suggest. Rates get quoted widely in this sector, and when we looked for a consistent definition behind them of who counts as a leaver and what they are divided by, we could not establish one. Before comparing your rate to anybody’s, define your own. How to do that is below.

Last updated 28 July 2026. No figure on this page is a sector average. The arithmetic is yours to run on your own numbers.

01 · Why

Why you probably do not know

Because "turnover" is four different questions wearing one word.

Does somebody who accepted an offer and never showed up count as a leaver? Does somebody who worked one shift and never came back? Does somebody who finished an assignment because the client died, which is not a failure of anything? Does somebody who moved to another one of your clients?

Each of those answers moves the number substantially, and in an industry where a meaningful share of new hires never complete a second shift, they can move it more than any real change in the underlying workforce would. Two agencies with identical workforces can report rates that differ by a factor of two purely on definition.

02 · The method

How to work it out for your agency

Write down your definition before you count anything, and keep it fixed.

turnover rate = leavers in the period ÷ average active headcount in the period

Then answer these four in writing:

Does a hire who never completes a shift count? (We would say no, and anchor the count at first completed shift.)
Does a natural assignment end count? (We would say no.)
Is your denominator headcount, or full-time equivalents?
Is the period a rolling twelve months or a calendar year?

Then run it two ways: your definition, and the widest possible definition where everybody counts. The gap between those two numbers is the thing worth understanding, because it is the range within which any quoted sector figure could be sitting.

03 · The figure

What a typical figure looks like

Figures circulate. We are not going to repeat one, because we could not verify what any of them measure, and repeating an unverified number is the exact behaviour that makes this whole area useless.

What we will say plainly is that a rate without a stated denominator is not a fact you can act on, whoever published it, and that includes any rate a vendor quotes at you as a problem their product solves.

04 · The limits

What this is not

This page does not tell you what reduces turnover. We are not going to make a claim about that, in either direction. The honest position is that the causal story is far weaker than the confidence with which it gets asserted, and we would rather say so than add to it.

It also does not tell you what turnover costs. That is a separate page and it is a more tractable question.

05 · Next

Define your denominator, then work out what a single early departure costs you. That number is defensible in a way the rate is not.

Not sure this is your biggest one? Rank all eight against your own numbers — fourteen questions, no score, and it asks for nothing before showing you the result.

All eight costs →