TalentBuild AIBuild or buy your next hire? Compare the real cost.
Upskilling someone on your team or hiring from outside both cost money, time and risk. This calculator puts them side by side over the same period, with official salary data pre-filled and every assumption in your hands.
How the comparison works
What counts for each route
- Both routes fill the seat, so the pay for the seat is counted for both: the outside hire's market pay, or the promoted employee's pay plus a raise.
- Buy adds the recruiter fee, the cost of the empty seat while you search, the ramp-up before the new hire is at full speed, and the risk they leave early.
- Build adds training spend, working time lost to training, mentoring, a settling-in period, the cost of refilling their old role, and the risk they leave anyway.
Where each number comes from
- Salary: official government wage data for the occupation you pick, shown with its 25th–75th percentile range.
- Training cost and time (Singapore): pick the skills and see what real short courses cost and how long they take, from the official MySkillsFuture course directory.
- Turnover (Singapore): official resignation and recruitment rates by industry from the Ministry of Manpower, to anchor the chance that a hire leaves.
- Everything else: a labelled default you can change. We don't present them as measured facts about your company.
- What flips the answer: the page tells you how far a key assumption would have to move before the cheaper route changes, so you can see which assumptions matter.
Singapore data: Ministry of Manpower Occupational Wage Survey (data.gov.sg, Singapore Open Data Licence). Australia data: Australian Bureau of Statistics, Characteristics of Employment (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0). This is an estimate, not HR, financial or legal advice.
Contains information from the MySkillsFuture Course Directory accessed from data.gov.sg, made available under the terms of the Singapore Open Data Licence version 1.0. Contains information from the Labour Market Survey accessed from data.gov.sg, made available under the terms of the Singapore Open Data Licence version 1.0.
Questions
Is the calculator free?
Yes. It is free to use with no sign-up. You can print the result as a one-page PDF, copy a link to share it, or ask for it by email. We only add you to a mailing list if you tick the box to say so.
Where does the salary come from?
From official government wage surveys: the Ministry of Manpower's Occupational Wage Survey for Singapore and the Australian Bureau of Statistics' Characteristics of Employment survey for Australia. We use the median gross monthly wage for the occupation you pick, multiplied by twelve. You can replace it with your own figure.
Where do the other numbers come from?
They are default assumptions, such as an agency fee of about 20%, two months to hire, and a few weeks of training. They are rules of thumb, not measurements of your company, and we label them as such. Change any of them in the advanced section, or choose the easy, typical or hard hiring market for a quick set of defaults. For Singapore roles you can replace two of them with official figures: real course costs and hours for the skills to be learned, and the Ministry of Manpower's turnover rates for the industry.
Why does the comparison count refilling the old role?
Moving someone up leaves their old seat empty. Hiring for the target role from outside doesn't. A fair comparison counts the fee, the empty seat and the ramp-up for whoever replaces them. You can switch this off if the old role won't be replaced.
Does it store anything about my employees?
No. The calculation runs in your browser, and it never asks for names or employee records. If you ask for the report by email, we store your email address and the numbers you modelled, and nothing else.
Is this HR, financial or legal advice?
No. It is an estimate built from assumptions you can see and change. Use it to frame a conversation, then check the figures that matter against your own data.
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