Time to Fill Calculator: Formula, Example and Benchmarks

What does time to fill measure?

Time to fill counts the calendar days between the day a job opens and the day a candidate accepts the offer. It tells the business how long a seat sits empty, which is why finance and hiring managers care about it more than any other recruiting number.

The metric belongs to the requisition, not the candidate. If a role opens on March 1 and someone accepts on April 14, time to fill is 44 days no matter when that person first applied. That is the key difference from time to hire, which starts the clock when the eventual hire enters your pipeline.

Before you report it, write down two choices and keep them fixed. First, the start point: the day the requisition was approved or the day the job was posted. Second, the end point: offer accepted or first day at work. Most teams use approval to acceptance. Changing either one halfway through the year makes your trend line meaningless.

Time to fill vs time to hire: what is the difference?

Time to fill measures how long a seat stays empty. Time to hire measures how fast your process moves once the right person is in it. Both end at offer accepted, so time to fill is always the same length or longer, and the gap between them is the time spent searching before your eventual hire showed up.

Report the two side by side. A long time to fill with a short time to hire means sourcing is the bottleneck. If both are long, your interviews, feedback and approvals are slowing things down.

How do you calculate time to fill step by step?

If a role was filled by two hires, count it as two fills only if both seats had their own requisition. Otherwise you will flatter the number.

1. Export every requisition filled in the period from your ATS with its open date and its offer accepted date.
2. Subtract the open date from the accepted date for each role to get days open.
3. Take out days the role was formally on hold, such as a budget freeze, and note that you did so.
4. Remove canceled roles and evergreen postings. They never had a single seat to fill.
5. Add up the days across all filled roles and divide by the number of roles filled.
6. Work out the median as well. One stale role can drag the average up by a week or more.
7. Split the result by role family, level and location so each recruiter is judged against similar work.

What does a worked time to fill example look like?

Say your team filled six roles last quarter. The table shows days open for each.

Total days open is 310 across six roles, so average time to fill is 51.7 days. Sort the six numbers and the median is 43.5 days. The two technical roles pull the average up by more than a week. Reporting both numbers, and splitting technical from business roles, tells leadership a far more accurate story than the average alone.

What is a good time to fill?

SHRM's 2026 benchmarking puts the median time to fill for nonexecutive roles at 39 calendar days, drawn from more than 4,600 organizations. That is the most widely quoted US reference point, and it is a median, so half of employers take longer.

Ashby publishes a related but different number, time to first fill, from its customer data. Its 2026 recruiting operations report finds that senior roles take 37% longer to fill than junior roles, and technical roles take about 15 days longer than business roles. Ashby's productivity report gives medians of 56 days for business roles and 76 for technical roles. Both sit well above SHRM, because they measure a different starting point and a sample weighted toward tech companies.

The lesson is to compare like with like. Hold a staff accountant to a different target than a senior engineer, and check which definition a benchmark uses before you put it in a slide.

How do you shorten time to fill?

Most of the delay sits before the first interview and after the last one. Attack those two gaps first.

• Run a proper intake meeting so must haves and pay range are agreed before you source.
• Keep warm pipelines for roles you hire every quarter, so you never start from zero.
• Search your ATS and CRM for past finalists before you post anything.
• Block interview slots on hiring manager calendars for the life of the search.
• Ask for written feedback within one working day of each interview.
• Get offer approval rules and salary bands signed off at intake, not at the offer stage.

How should you report time to fill to leadership?

Report time to fill as a monthly trend by role family, with the median beside the average and your target on the same line. Leaders want to know three things: is it getting better, which roles are slow, and why. A single company number answers none of them.

Pair the figure with the cost of an empty seat. A sales role that stays open 30 days longer than plan has a revenue cost, and a nursing vacancy has an overtime or agency cost. When you show the days next to the money, a request for an extra sourcer or a faster approval chain becomes a business case rather than a complaint.

Explain the drivers you do not control. If a requisition waited 12 days for budget sign off or the hiring manager was away for two weeks, say so with dates. Most delays sit with approvals, interview availability and feedback, and the people who can fix those are usually in the room when you present.

Finally, flag every role that is past twice your target. Those few searches need a decision: change the brief, change the pay, widen the location, or pause the role. Reviewing them by name each month stops old requisitions from quietly dragging down the whole team's number.

What time to fill mistakes should you avoid?

• Mixing start points across teams, so one group counts from approval and another from posting.
• Reporting only the average and letting one ancient requisition define the quarter.
• Counting evergreen or pipeline postings, which never close and inflate every result.
• Setting one company wide target, which makes recruiters on hard roles look slow when they are not.
• Chasing speed alone. A fast fill that leaves in 90 days restarts the clock, so read this number next to quality of hire and new hire turnover.