Skip to the main content.
Talk to an expert
Talk to an expert
Featured Offer
Ambitious 50 →
6 months of Hire and Engage free for businesses under 50 people.

Hey Compono!

A coach that actually gets you.

Get 10 minutes free, then $15 a month. Cancel anytime.

Get Started ≫
Free tools for HR leaders

Cost of employee disengagement
calculator

Put a dollar figure on the quiet productivity drain most engagement surveys never cost out.

Your numbers

Only about 20% of employees are engaged globally (Gallup)
Estimated annual cost
 
Share
How do you calculate the cost of disengaged employees?

Multiply the number of disengaged employees by their average salary, then by the productivity loss a disengaged employee represents. Gallup estimates that loss at about 18% of salary for disengaged staff. To find your disengaged headcount, multiply total headcount by one minus your engagement rate.

How we calculated this

We start with your engagement rate and treat everyone outside it as disengaged. That disengaged headcount is multiplied by your average salary and by 18%, Gallup's estimate of what an employee who is not engaged costs their organisation each year as a share of salary. The result is output you are paying for and not receiving, spread across people who still turn up, rather than a cash outflow you could find in the accounts. The second line shows what a 10-point lift in engagement would claw back. The working, the assumptions and the sources are below.

New to the term? Read the plain-English definition of employee engagement in the HR Glossary.

Your working
Assumptions
  • Everyone who is not engaged is treated the same. Gallup separates "not engaged" from "actively disengaged", and the actively disengaged cost more again, so if your survey shows a large actively disengaged group the real figure is higher than the one shown.
  • The 18% of salary figure is Gallup's estimate for employees who are not engaged. It is a productivity loss rather than a cash cost, and it is applied to base salary only. On-costs are excluded, so the number is conservative.
  • The default engagement rate of 20% is the global figure from Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 report. Use your own survey figure if you have one, because the result is only as good as that input.
  • The 10-point recovery line assumes the people who move to engaged recover the full 18%. In practice engagement moves in fractions of a point a year, so treat that line as the size of the prize rather than a forecast.
Sources

What to do about it

The number above is not a bill anyone will send you. It is output you are already paying for and not receiving, spread across people who still turn up, which makes it easy to ignore and expensive to keep ignoring. These steps are for whoever owns the engagement result, whether or not they own the budget.

1

Put it in the CFO's language

Divide the figure by your total salary bill and present it as the share of payroll that produces nothing. Finance will argue with the 18%. Good. The argument itself gets a cost on the table that has never had a line before, and once it has one it gets managed like every other line.

2
Where a tool helps

Find out where the disengagement sits

A company-wide 20% engaged hides teams at 5% and teams at 50%. Cut your survey results by team and by manager before you do anything else. If all you have is an annual survey with a single company score, that is the first thing to fix, because nobody can act on an average.

3

Ask the disengaged what changed, while they still work for you

Most disengagement has a date on it: a new manager, a restructure, a promise that lapsed, a workload that never came back down. Short, regular pulse checks with one free-text question beat a long annual survey that lands after people have gone quiet. Write the answers down by team.

4

Fix the manager before the perk

Gallup attributes about 70% of the variance in team engagement to the manager. If one team's numbers sit far below the rest, the fix is coaching or a change of manager, and neither costs what a company-wide engagement program does. Perks lift the average for a quarter. Managers move it for years.

5

Re-run this with your own survey number every quarter

Replace the 20% default with your actual engagement rate, note the dollar figure, and track it beside turnover and unplanned absence. After a year you have a trend line you can defend, and a way to show whether whatever you funded in step 1 is working.

Step 2 is where
the survey runs out.

Compono Engage is an employee engagement platform that reads culture and climate alongside work personality, team by team, so the disengagement you just priced comes with the teams attached. Most survey tools stop at the score. Engage shows which teams are drifting, what changed for them, how the people in them prefer to work and what to do first, in a form a manager can act on this month.

That is step 2 done properly, and step 3 running all year instead of once. The figure above is what disengagement costs across everyone. Engage tells you where in the business it is being spent, which is the only version of the number you can do anything about.

See how it works
Compono Engage
8%+
reduction in turnover

Common questions

How much does employee disengagement cost globally?

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace estimates low engagement costs the world economy around $10 trillion a year in lost productivity, equal to roughly 9% of global GDP.

What percentage of employees are disengaged?

Gallup reports that only about 20% of employees worldwide are engaged at work, which leaves the large majority either not engaged or actively disengaged.

What is the difference between disengaged and actively disengaged?

A disengaged employee has checked out and does the minimum. An actively disengaged employee is unhappy and can work against the organisation's goals. Gallup costs disengagement at about 18% of salary; the actively disengaged cost more again.

This page is general information, not legal advice. We check figures annually and update them on a best-efforts basis, but employment rules change and we cannot promise everything here is current or complete. Before you act on it, confirm the detail with the relevant authority in your country or your own adviser. Last reviewed July 2026.

Next step

Business case

Build the business case

Turn this number into a document your CFO can question line by line.

Open the builder →Related tool

Employee engagement ROI calculator

Keep the same numbers moving. The next calculator picks up where this one stops.

Run it next →HR Glossary

Employee engagement

The plain-English definition, with the calculators and rules that sit around it.

Read the definition →Talk to us

Bring us your number

A 30-minute conversation about what it means for you, not a demo script.

Talk to us →