Engineering Headcount ROI Calculator
Calculate the ROI of your engineering team. See the true cost per engineer and what productivity gains would mean for your bottom line.
Enter Your Team Data
Typical range: $150K-$350K depending on location and seniority. Includes salary, benefits, equipment, and overhead.
Industry research suggests 20-40% of engineering time is lost to inefficiencies. See breakdown below.
Conservative: 5-10%. Moderate: 10-20%. Aggressive: 20-30%. Depends on current maturity and investment.
Enter the annual cost of the tool, platform, or initiative you're evaluating.
Enter the number of engineers and cost per engineer above to see your analysis.
Common Sources of Productivity Loss
Industry research consistently shows that 20-40% of engineering time is lost to inefficiencies. Here's where that time typically goes:
Interruptions, meetings, and task switching
PRs blocked waiting for reviewer availability
Rework due to ambiguous specs or late-stage changes
Working around legacy code, slow builds, flaky tests
Setup issues, slow CI/CD, environment problems
About This Calculator
This calculator helps VPs and Directors of Engineering quantify the financial impact of engineering inefficiencies and evaluate the ROI of improvement initiatives.
Includes salary, benefits, taxes, equipment, office space, and management overhead. Typically 1.3-1.5x base salary.
Time spent on non-value-adding activities: waiting, rework, context switching, and fighting tooling issues.
The percentage of lost productivity you can realistically recover through better tooling, processes, or practices.
(Annual Savings - Tool Cost) / Tool Cost x 100. Positive ROI means the initiative pays for itself within the first year.
Want to track this automatically?
CodePulse connects to your GitHub and calculates these metrics in real-time. No more manual data entry or spreadsheets.
Free tier available. No credit card required.
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