Voluntary Turnover Rate
Also known as Voluntary Attrition, Resignation Rate
Voluntary turnover rate is the percentage of employees who choose to leave — resignations and retirements — as a share of average headcount. Isolating it from involuntary exits is what turns a turnover number into a retention signal, because only voluntary departures reflect decisions your organisation could have influenced.
Formula
Voluntary Turnover Rate (%) = (Voluntary separations ÷ Average headcount) × 100Retirements are technically voluntary but are rarely preventable. Many teams report them as a third category so the preventable number stays clean.
Worked example
- Scenario
- A 500-person company has 84 total exits: 61 resignations, 8 retirements and 15 terminations.
- Calculation
- Voluntary (excluding retirement) = (61 ÷ 500) × 100
- Result
- 12.2% voluntary turnover, against 16.8% total turnover — a 4.6-point gap that a headline number would have hidden
What good looks like
Voluntary turnover typically accounts for 60–75% of total turnover in a stable organisation. If involuntary exits make up more than about a third of your separations, the issue is usually upstream in hiring or performance management rather than in retention.
Why voluntary turnover rate matters
Total turnover mixes two very different stories. A restructuring and a resignation wave produce the same headline figure but demand opposite responses. Voluntary turnover is the number that tells you whether people are choosing to stay, and it is the one that should move when engagement, pay or management quality improves.
How to improve it
- 1Report voluntary, involuntary and retirement as three separate lines rather than one total.
- 2Track voluntary turnover by manager. Management quality is consistently one of the strongest predictors of a resignation decision.
- 3Pair the metric with engagement scores from three to six months earlier — engagement is a leading indicator, turnover is the lagging one.
- 4Run stay interviews with the population you cannot afford to lose, rather than relying on exit interviews after the decision is made.
- 5Watch the trend by tenure band to find where in the employee lifecycle people disengage.
Common mistakes
- Classifying a managed exit — where someone resigns under performance pressure — as voluntary, which flatters the number.
- Including retirements without flagging them, which makes an ageing workforce look like a retention failure.
- Reading a fall in voluntary turnover as good news during a weak labour market, when people may simply have fewer options.
Frequently asked questions
Is voluntary turnover always bad?
No. Some voluntary turnover is healthy — it creates promotion room, refreshes skills and moves poor fits on without a formal process. What matters is whether the leavers are people you would have kept, which is what regretted attrition measures.
How do I classify a resignation during a PIP?
Most organisations record it separately as a managed exit. Counting it as voluntary understates involuntary turnover and hides how much of your attrition is performance-driven.
Related metrics
Employee turnover rate is the percentage of employees who leave an organisation over a set period, divided by the average headcount for that period. It is the headline retention metric most HR teams report to their board, and it covers both voluntary resignations and involuntary exits.
Regretted Attrition RateRegretted attrition rate is the share of departures the organisation would have preferred to prevent — typically strong performers, people in critical roles, and those with scarce skills. It is the retention metric that correlates most directly with business impact, because it strips out the exits that were neutral or beneficial.
Employee Retention RateEmployee retention rate is the percentage of employees who remain with the organisation across a defined period, measured against the headcount present at the start. Unlike turnover, it only counts people who were already employed at the start of the period, so new hires who join and leave within it do not distort the figure.
Employee Net Promoter Score (eNPS)Employee Net Promoter Score is a single-question measure of advocacy: how likely employees are, on a 0–10 scale, to recommend the organisation as a place to work. The score is the percentage of promoters (9–10) minus the percentage of detractors (0–6), producing a number between −100 and +100.
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