New Hire Runway Impact Calculator
How many months of runway could your next hire cost you?
→ Find out in under 2 minutes.
A single mis-timed hire can cost a seed or Series A company several months of runway. Yet the decision to make that hire — and the decision about which hire comes first — is usually made on a salary figure and a gut feel about urgency. This tool replaces the gut feel with the actual cash arithmetic: the fully-loaded cost of the role and the month-by-month effect on your runway.
How it works Read the 3 steps
Add your hire. Role, seniority, employment type, and pay. Employer taxes, benefits and recruitment costs are pre-filled for your country and fully editable. Contractors and fractional leaders are costed differently from payroll hires, because they are.
Add your cash position. Monthly burn and months of runway. Your runway chart renders immediately: cash remaining, month by month, before and after the hire.
Go deeper if you want to. Map your team, priorities and founder workload to unlock your Ascent Runway Efficiency score — a rating out of 10 for how well your hiring plan fits your gaps, your cash and your stage.
Your hire
Contractors and fractional leaders are costed differently from payroll hires — no employer taxes or benefits, and a lighter hiring cost.
Cost assumptions —
Defaults use current 2026 employer on-costs for your country; recruitment is weighted by seniority. Probation and notice default to a common pattern — enter your contract's terms. Every default is editable — see how we book cost over time.
Your cash position
Answering “Prefer not to disclose” reduces the accuracy of this calculator's outputs.
Answering “Prefer not to disclose” reduces the accuracy of this calculator's outputs.
Your runway chart renders on the right: cash remaining month by month, before and after the hire.
Dive deeper → Team & priorities
Indicate up to 3 top priorities for the next 12 months, then pick the functions that matter most for reaching them and map who covers each.
Dive deeper → Founder bandwidth
How many hours a week you personally spend running each of these — the load a strong team would progressively take off you.
Dive deeper → Role clarity
Effort duplication creates churn and delays. Your read on current scope clarity.
Answering “Prefer not to disclose” reduces the accuracy of this calculator's outputs.
These suggestions are auto-generated based on your inputs.
Speak to Talent Ascent to get tailored support on how to improve the efficiency of your hiring.
Open Go deeper above — map your team, priorities and founder workload — for a rating out of 10 of how well your hiring plan fits your gaps, your cash and your stage.
The New Hire ROI Calculator shows how long before this hire pays for themselves — break-even, time-to-productivity, and an up to 36-month return forecast.
Open the Hire ROI Calculator →Cost and return, side by side, are how a hiring decision should be made.
Get your free detailed report
A CSV you can circulate to your co-founder or investors: your month-by-month runway table, every cost assumption, your five score components and your recommendations.
Welcome back — your report is ready.
Directional planning guidance based on the assumptions shown — not financial, legal, tax or HR advice.
New Hire Cost Report - $1,000
- Loaded cost of the hire
- Opportunity cost
- Manager & onboarding time
- 25-minute delivery call
Seeing the runway cost of a hire is one thing. Building a hiring approach that consistently makes the right hire, in the right order, at the right time — without burning months of runway on mis-hires or a search that drags — is what actually protects your cash and your roadmap. That's the work: turning ad-hoc, founder-led hiring into a system that fits a company your size, run by someone who has built senior and executive hiring functions inside high-growth tech companies.
You need the hiring engine fixed, fast.
Embedded talent leadership that runs your hiring end to end — role definition, market mapping, process and calibration — for the period you need it, then hands you a system that keeps working.
See how embedded TA leadership works →You want to know what's broken before you fix it.
A structured diagnostic of your current hiring — where the gaps are, what they're costing you, and the specific changes that would de-risk your next hires.
Start with a hiring diagnostic →Running this across a portfolio? There's a partner track for VCs and operator-leads who need the same hiring rigour applied consistently across multiple companies. Explore the portfolio partner track →
The number that matters isn't the salary — it's the fully-loaded, time-phased effect on your cash. Here's what stands behind the outputs, and why they're more honest than a back-of-envelope estimate.
01 The true cost of a hire Current 2026 UK / US / EU rates
Salary is roughly two-thirds of what an employee actually costs. The full figure adds employer taxes, benefits, recruitment, tooling and onboarding — and those on-costs differ by country and by whether you hire onto payroll or engage a contractor or fractional leader. The tool applies the correct treatment for each, weights recruitment by seniority, and shows every default editable.
02 Cost over time, not one number Time-phased cash model
A hire doesn’t hit your account evenly. Recruitment and onboarding are front-loaded, salary recurs monthly, and a second or third planned hire starts later. Averaging that into one figure hides the early cash dip that actually threatens a runway, so the tool books each cost in the month it lands.
03 How the score is formed Stage-appropriate benchmarks
The Ascent Runway Efficiency score reads five things that decide whether a plan is sound at your stage: how severe your functional gaps are, how much execution depends on founder hours, how much runway the plan consumes, whether your first hire attacks your biggest gap, and how clean ownership is today. Each ships with a visible breakdown.
04 What the benchmarks rest on Carta · fundraising market data
Stage and runway context comes from published market data — Carta’s startup benchmarks on team size and graduation rates, and current guidance on fundraising duration and safe runway levels. Sources and refresh dates sit against each figure; where we couldn’t source a claim to a primary dataset, we left it out.
05 Limitations Conservative by design
This is directional planning guidance, not financial, legal, tax or HR advice. It models a hiring plan at a point in time — it doesn’t audit your hiring system — and it keeps its assumptions deliberately conservative: a number you can defend to a co-founder or an investor, not an optimistic one.
Three analytical views of the same decision
Same role benchmarks, three free tools. You're in the New Hire Runway Impact Calculator — the others model the same hire from acquisition cost and return perspectives.
All figures are directional planning guidance based on the sourced assumptions shown, not financial, legal, tax or HR advice. Assumptions are reviewed on the dates shown against the linked sources.