Revenue Per Employee Calculator
Revenue and profit per head — the crudest productivity measure, and a useful one.
Revenue per employee divides revenue by headcount.
How the revenue per employee calculator works
Revenue per employee divides revenue by headcount. It is blunt, ignores capital intensity entirely, and is meaningless across industries — a software company and a staffing agency are not comparable on it.
Within an industry, and over time within one company, it is genuinely informative. It is one of the few measures that shows whether growth is coming from leverage or from simply adding people, and the trend matters far more than the level.
Profit per employee is the harder measure and the more revealing one: it is possible to grow revenue per head while profit per head falls, which is what happens when a business buys growth with discounts.
Formula: revenue per employee = revenue / headcount
Worked examples
| Inputs | Revenue per employee | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 5m revenue across 25 people | $200,000.00 | 200,000 each |
| A leaner team | $500,000.00 | 500,000 each |
| A people-heavy business | $83,333.33 | payroll is 76% of revenue |
FAQFrequently asked questions
What is revenue per employee?
Annual revenue divided by full-time-equivalent headcount.
What is a good figure?
Entirely industry-dependent. Software companies often exceed 300,000; staffing and retail businesses run far lower. Compare within your industry only.
Should I count contractors?
Include them as full-time equivalents if they do the work of staff. Leaving them out flatters the figure.
Is profit per employee more useful?
Usually yes. Revenue per head can rise while profit per head falls, which is what buying growth with discounts looks like.
What payroll share is normal?
Roughly 15–30% in capital-intensive businesses, 40–60% in professional services and above 70% in people-heavy services.
Where these figures come from
- Corporate Finance Institute — EBITDA — why EBITDA is a non-GAAP measure with no single definition
- US SEC — Non-GAAP Financial Measures, Compliance & Disclosure Interpretations — the disclosure rules that exist precisely because EBITDA is not standardised
- Australian Securities and Investments Commission — the Australian corporate regulator
Last checked: September 2026. These are standard management-accounting definitions; where a term has no single agreed definition, the page says so.