You are deciding which job orders are worth your week, and that decision starts with what each one pays you. Every page ranking for this question answers a different question: what an agency will cost the employer. This one is about what the percentage means on your side of the desk.
Ten of those pages rank and every one gives a range. Across the ten they scatter from 8.33% to 40%, with nothing in between agreed on, and none names a sample, a source or a date. More usefully, none tells you the thing that actually decides how much money a percentage is.
Three recruitment agencies publish an actual fee on their own website. All three calculate it on a different number, and on one candidate that difference can be worth more than the fee itself.
The three that publish
Reed, a UK agency, publishes an Employment Agency Terms of Business on its own domain, effective 1 April 2025 and read on 29 August 2026. It sets four service tiers: Lite at 17%, Standard at 22%, Advanced at 25% and Premium at 27%. The base is total first-year gross remuneration, which the document defines to include commission, bonus, benefits and car allowance.
Specified Select, an Australian agency, publishes three: retained at 13%, exclusive contingent at 15% and non-exclusive contingent at 17%, on a page updated in July 2026. Its base is base salary plus superannuation plus car allowance, and the page states explicitly that it excludes on-target earnings and commission. The exclusion is presented as a deliberate feature of how they price.
Valuable Recruitment publishes retained search at 10% to 15% of first-year base salary, with 30% to 50% of the fee payable at kickoff.
Read as percentages, 17% and 15% and 15% look like the same business. They are not.
What the base does to the money
Take one candidate package for illustration: £60,000 base, a £15,000 bonus, a £5,000 car allowance. Eighty thousand pounds of total first-year remuneration.
Apply the three published bases to it.
| Base the fee is levied on | Rate | What it multiplies | Fee |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total first-year remuneration, including bonus and car | 22% | £80,000 | £17,600 |
| Base plus car allowance | 15% | £65,000 | £9,750 |
| Base salary alone | 10% | £60,000 | £6,000 |
The middle row is the Specified Select shape, whose own base also includes superannuation, for which this UK illustration has no equivalent line. The bottom row is Valuable Recruitment's retained rate.
The same hire. Between six thousand pounds and seventeen thousand six hundred, a spread of nearly three times, produced by percentages of 22, 15 and 10. Twelve points of spread on the percentage, three times the money.
Reed operates in the UK and Specified Select in Australia, so this is not a comparison of their prices. It is a demonstration of what happens when the same-looking number is applied to different bases, which is the arithmetic that every ranked page skips.
For your own desk the consequence is straightforward. On a base-only fee, a candidate's bonus and car allowance are worth nothing to you, and a heavily variable-compensated role pays you less than its headline suggests. On a total-remuneration fee, the same role is your best order of the month.
Permanent and temporary are not the same metric
Half the ranges circulating on this query are not fees at all.
The Crown Commercial Service framework for non-clinical staffing, RM6277, states the distinction in its own user guide: for fixed-term appointments the charge is a percentage of the worker's annual salary, pro rata. For agency supply, the charge is an hourly or daily rate. Two different metrics for two different placement types, from a document that has to be precise because it is contractual.
So when a page quotes a fee percentage from that 8.33% to 40% scatter and then mentions an hourly markup three lines later, it has silently changed subject. Two of the pages on this SERP do exactly that, quoting a markup multiplier alongside a placement fee, and neither figure is corroborated anywhere. A permanent fee is a one-off percentage of a salary. A temp markup is a recurring margin on hours worked, and the two produce completely different businesses.
What is not published, and where it is
The most useful fact for anyone trying to benchmark is how little of this exists in public.
No US recruitment agency found in this research publishes a fee percentage on its own domain. Robert Half, Adecco, Randstad, ManpowerGroup, gpac, Kforce, WinterWyman/The Planet Group and Lucas Group were all checked on 29 August 2026. gpac's page on the cost of a new hire describes its model as contingency with no upfront fee, and gives no percentage anywhere. The rest give nothing.
UK public sector procurement is the one place where recruitment fees become contractual, dated and public, and even there the numbers stop at the door. The Crown Commercial Service's Permanent Recruitment 2 framework, RM6229, ran from March 2022 and expired on 28 March 2026. RM6277 runs to April 2027 with 169 suppliers across seven lots, which is the public sector's version of a preferred supplier list, with the term and the expiry date printed rather than held privately. RM6229 caps a percentage of framework prices. RM6277 covers temporary, fixed-term and contractor supply rather than permanent placement, and it caps a percentage of annual salary for fixed-term appointments and an hourly or daily rate rather than a percentage for temporary agency supply. Neither publishes its numbers on an open page. RM6277's rate card is obtainable only through a named contact, and RM6229's pricing schedule was never reachable as a document.
What does surface from public sector sources is spend rather than rate. A Freedom of Information response from The Pensions Regulator discloses £299,100 on permanent recruitment fees. It separately reports £216,560 spent through one framework, £30,210 through RM6229 and nothing through a third, figures that fall some £52,000 short of the total and leave the remainder unexplained. That tells you frameworks are genuinely used. It does not tell you at what percentage.
Two industry bodies hold the answer and sell it. APSCo's Recruitment Index and Staffing Industry Analysts' gross margin and bill rate research both cover this territory, and both are membership-gated, with SIA stating plainly that full access to research is for members.
That is the honest state of the record. Three published percentages, two contractual frameworks with the numbers removed, two paywalls, and a SERP full of ranges with no provenance.
Recruiters discussing fees in public illustrate the same split. One gives a contract bill rate of $74.50 to $77.50 an hour without stating the pay rate underneath it, which is the number that would make it mean anything. Another puts permanent work at anything from 10% of gross annual salary up to 40% for highly specialised headhunting. Individual reports, no sample and no method behind either, and useful only as a reminder that the two sides of the business are quoted in different units.
Which job orders this makes worth pursuing
The point of knowing the base is deciding where the hour goes.
Two inputs matter and only one of them is measurable. The fee on a given order you can compute exactly once you know the percentage and the base. What the pursuit costs you is the part nobody publishes for agencies, and the closest public figures measure something adjacent. SHRM's 2025 recruiting benchmarking work, fielded January to March 2025 across 2,371 respondents, reports a median US cost per hire of $1,200 for non-executive roles and $10,625 for executive roles, with a median time to fill of around 45 days. Those are the employer's costs to fill a position, not an agency's cost to work an order, and they should not be read as a proxy for it.
What you can do is rank orders by fee against effort, using the base rather than the headline. A £200,000 executive role on a 10% base-only retainer is £20,000. A £70,000 sales role with £30,000 of variable pay, on a 22% total-remuneration fee, is £22,000. The second one looks like the smaller job and pays more, and you would never see that from the percentages.
The pursuit question sits on top of that. The larger fee on an order several agencies are already working is not worth more than a smaller fee on an order nobody has called about, and the difference between those two situations is knowable before you spend the hour. Some of it is printed on the posting and some of it is not, and reading which one you are looking at is a separate job from pricing it.
Six questions before you take the order
What is the percentage calculated on, in exact words, and does the base include bonus, commission and car allowance. This is the whole article. A percentage is not a price until you know what it multiplies.
What is this role's actual package, rather than its advertised salary, because on a total-remuneration fee the variable pay is your money too.
How many other agencies already have this order, and on what terms. A larger fee you are fifth in line for is worth less than a smaller fee nobody else is working.
Is this a permanent fee or a temp markup, and if the role could convert, what happens then.
What is the rebate period, and is it a refund or a replacement, because a refund clause turns an early leaver into unpaid work.
When does the invoice become payable, relative to the candidate's start date rather than the offer.
Frequently asked
- What percentage do recruitment agencies charge?
- The three agencies found publishing a fee on their own website charge between 10% and 27%, and each calculates it on a different base. Reed's UK terms of business list four tiers from 17% to 27% of total first-year remuneration including commission, bonus, benefits and car allowance. An Australian agency publishes 13% to 17% of base salary plus superannuation and car allowance, excluding commission. Another publishes retained search at 10% to 15% of first-year base salary alone.
- What is a recruitment fee calculated on?
- It depends entirely on the agency, and the difference is large. Some calculate on total first-year gross remuneration, which includes bonus, commission, benefits and car allowance. Others calculate on base salary alone, or on base plus specific allowances while explicitly excluding on-target earnings. On a package of £60,000 base with a £15,000 bonus and a £5,000 car allowance, a 22% total-remuneration fee is £17,600 and a 10% base-only fee is £6,000.
- Is a temp agency markup the same as a permanent placement fee?
- No, and confusing them is common on pages that quote fee ranges. A permanent placement fee is a one-off percentage of a salary. A temporary or contract markup is a recurring margin applied to an hourly or daily rate for as long as the worker is on assignment. A UK public sector staffing framework states the two as separate charging mechanisms in its own guidance.
- Do US recruitment agencies publish their fees?
- Not on their own websites. Robert Half, Adecco, Randstad, ManpowerGroup, gpac, Kforce, WinterWyman/The Planet Group and Lucas Group were checked in August 2026 and none publishes a fee percentage. One describes its model as contingency with no upfront fee and gives no number. Every US percentage circulating online comes from a third party rather than from an agency's own page.
- Where can I find a real, dated recruitment fee?
- UK public sector procurement is the only place recruitment fees become contractual and public, through Crown Commercial Service frameworks. Even there the numeric rate cards are held behind a contact form rather than published openly. Industry bodies including APSCo and Staffing Industry Analysts hold margin and rate research, and both restrict access to members.