Practical use cases
- Measuring how well a defined group of employees is retained over a period.
- Tracking retention for a team or cohort consistently over time.
- Pairing with turnover to see the same period from both directions.
Calculator
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How it works
The formula is:
(Employees who stayed ÷ Employees at the start) × 100
Count only the people who were present at the start of the period. People hired during the period are excluded from this calculation — they belong to new-hire retention, which is measured separately.
Worked example: If you started with 120 employees and 110 of that original group are still employed at the end, retention is (110 ÷ 120) × 100 ≈ 91.7% for that period.
For the full background — what it measures, why it matters and how to read it — see the employee retention rate guide.
How to read the result
Retention and turnover answer related but different questions: retention asks how much of a starting group you kept, turnover asks how much movement there was relative to average headcount. They are not always exact mirror images because of how each is defined and which population each counts.
As with turnover, the period and the population matter. Retention of a specific cohort (a team, a hiring class) is usually more actionable than a single organisation-wide figure.
Common mistakes
- Including people hired during the period in the "stayed" count — that mixes retention with new-hire retention.
- Comparing retention across different period lengths.
- Treating retention as the exact complement of turnover; the two use different denominators and definitions.
- Reporting a single number without saying which group and which period it covers.
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