The number
What turnover actually costs
Turnover is one of the largest hidden costs a small business carries, because most of it never shows up as a line item. It hides in job ads and recruiter fees, in the hours your team spends interviewing, in the weeks a seat sits empty, and in the three to six months a new hire takes to reach full output. Add it up and the research lands in a consistent range.
For a typical ten-person firm paying an average of $55,000, even a conservative model, a 13 percent voluntary turnover rate and a replacement cost of a quarter of salary, works out to roughly $18,000 a year in turnover cost. Skew toward higher-churn roles and it climbs past $28,000. The Center for American Progress put the typical figure near 21 percent of salary (a rigorous 2012 study), and Work Institute uses about a third of salary as its all-in estimate, so a quarter is a deliberately cautious midpoint.
The lever
People stay where they feel taken care of
The reason turnover is mostly preventable is that most departures are not about pay alone. They are about whether people feel valued. That is where a benefit does its quiet work: it is a concrete, recurring signal that the employer has the team's back. The survey evidence on this is unusually consistent.
Honest framing: these are correlations from workplace surveys, not proof that adding one benefit makes a given person stay. Caring employers tend to be well-run in many ways at once. But across Gallup, MetLife, APA, SHRM and Aflac the direction is the same, people who feel their employer has their back are markedly less likely to leave, and the cost of even one avoided departure dwarfs the price of the benefit.
Why dental
Dental is the cheap, visible way to show it
Not every benefit signals care equally, and not every benefit is affordable for a small business. Dental is the rare one that is both. It is consistently one of the most wanted benefits after medical, 88 percent of workers weigh health, dental and vision heavily when choosing between jobs (Fractl, via Harvard Business Review), yet it is far from universal at small firms, which is exactly what makes offering it a differentiator.
Because cleanings are covered at 100 percent, a dental plan also pays people back where they feel it, at the chair, every six months. It is a benefit that is used, not just held, which is what turns it from a line on an offer letter into a felt reason to stay. And group dental costs an employer only a few thousand dollars a year for a small team, so it only has to nudge retention slightly to pay for itself.
Turn the math into a real plan
See what dental would cost your team and the turnover it offsets, then get a concierge comparison and route covered employees to a vetted dentist.
How we know
Sources
- Replacement cost and aggregate turnover: Gallup; Center for American Progress (2012); Work Institute Retention Report (2024).
- Quits and turnover rate: BLS JOLTS (2026).
- Caring employer and retention: Gallup wellbeing; MetLife EBTS 2025; APA Work in America 2024; Aflac WorkForces 2024; SHRM 2024.
- Dental demand and cost: Fractl via Harvard Business Review (2016 data); BLS Employee Benefits, March 2025; NADP 2024.
Some widely cited figures (Gallup's $1 trillion and 50 to 200 percent of salary) originate from analyses that predate 2024 but remain Gallup's active framing. The Fractl dental figure is 2016 data, still the canonical "dental beats pay" stat. We label estimates as estimates and present survey findings as associations.