The real cost of agency hiring in social care

The headline rate is 15–25% of first year salary. On a £25,000 role, that's between £3,750 and £6,250. For a care provider making ten hires a year, that's potentially £62,500 in agency fees — before you've even started accounting for the re-placements.

But the true cost of agency hiring goes well beyond the fee. There's the management time spent briefing agencies, reviewing candidates, chasing updates, and managing multiple supplier relationships. There's the quality risk that comes from agencies optimising for placement volume rather than long-term fit. And there's the re-placement risk — what happens when the hire leaves in month two and you're back at the start?

Agency contracts typically include a rebate period of 8–12 weeks. But the damage of a short-tenure hire goes far beyond the fee credit. There's the cost of the gap in your rota while you re-recruit. There's the impact on your team's morale when turnover is visible. And there's the reputational cost — with candidates, with families, and sometimes with commissioners — of instability.

The care sector has been slower than others to move away from agency dependency, partly because the volume of compliance checks required made DIY recruitment seem daunting. But the compliance burden is precisely where technology can help most — and where the savings are most significant.

Our analysis of clients who switched from agency to Lily for comparable hires shows an average saving of £2,800 per hire on End to End, rising to over £4,000 when you include management time saved. For a provider making 20 hires per year, that's over £80,000 in annual savings.