How much do recruiters make per hire? The fee, the share and the salary

Short answer: it depends on who the recruiter works for. An in-house recruiter earns a salary and nothing per hire: the May 2025 federal median for the occupation is $75,940 a year, and $64,130 in healthcare and social assistance. An agency recruiter earns a share of the placement fee the employer pays, and that fee is a percentage of the hire's first-year pay: retained executive search firms publish a retainer of about one-third of estimated first-year compensation, and the largest retained firm to report an average billed $146,000 per search in its latest annual report. An independent recruiter keeps the whole fee, less the costs and taxes of running a business. The figure nobody publishes is the recruiter's cut: every agency sets its own split.

Three answers to one question

What the employer pays per hire

A recruiter's per-hire income is a slice of a fee, so the fee comes first. The firms that file annual reports describe it the same way. Robert Half, the largest publicly reported permanent placement business, says: "Fees for successful placements are paid only by the employer and are generally a percentage of the new employee's annual compensation. No fee for placement services is charged to employment candidates." Its revenue from that business, the report adds, is driven by "the number of candidate placements and average fees earned per placement", and the fee is recognized when the candidate accepts the offer, net of an allowance for hires who do not stay through its 90-day guarantee period. The filing does not state the percentage; contingency fees are negotiated per client.

The same report shows how those two drivers moved in 2025: permanent placement revenue fell to $440 million from $487 million, "due to a 13.6% decrease in the number of placements, partially offset by a 3.8% increase in average fees earned per placement." Fewer hires, each worth a little more: that is the arithmetic every contingency recruiter's year is made of.

Retained executive search is the one segment that publishes a per-search figure. Heidrick & Struggles reports that "the average revenue per executive search increased to $146,000 in 2024 compared to $140,000 in the prior year", from 418 executive search consultants who each produced about $2.0 million in annual net revenue. Its filing explains the fee behind that number: retained firms "are paid a retainer for their services equal to approximately one-third of the estimated first year compensation for the position to be filled", may bill "one-third of the excess" when the hire's actual pay comes in higher, and are paid "regardless of whether the client employs a candidate identified by the search firm." Korn Ferry's fee is the same shape, "generally one-third of the estimated first-year cash compensation of the placed candidate, plus a percentage of the fee to cover indirect engagement-related expenses", with an uptick fee when the final package exceeds the estimate. In its fiscal year to April 2026 Korn Ferry's executive search business booked $924.1 million in fee revenue from "more than 6,500 new engagements with an average of 563 consultants", and its North American growth came partly from "a 6% increase in the weighted-average fee billed per engagement." Its professional search business, which places mid-level staff, reached $741,000 of annual fee revenue per consultant.

One-third of first-year compensation is a published rule, so you can apply it yourself: a retained search for a $300,000 role carries a retainer of about $100,000 before indirect expenses and any uptick. That is the pool a retained consultant's bonus is drawn from, and the per-hire price a health system pays for a chief nursing officer or a department chair.

How much do internal recruiters make?

An internal recruiter is paid for the year, not the hire. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts recruiters inside "human resources specialists", the occupation that recruits, screens and interviews applicants and places new hires, and puts it at 939,700 jobs in 2025, growing 6% from 2025 to 2035 with about 73,700 openings a year. Its May 2025 wages:

The lowest-paid 10% earned under $47,180 and the highest-paid 10% over $128,720. The survey behind those figures measures straight-time gross pay and already includes "incentive pay, including commissions and production bonuses", so the employment services row is what agency recruiters took home with commission counted, and it is the lowest row in the table. The healthcare and social assistance row is the typical salary of a recruiter on a hospital's or health system's own payroll.

To turn a salary into a per-hire number for your own team, divide each recruiter's loaded cost by the hires they close in a year; the result falls as the recruiter closes more, which is the opposite of an agency fee, which is owed again on every hire. That difference is the whole budget case for an in-house team, and it only holds if the team has the capacity to source its own candidates rather than hand the hard searches to an agency.

What an agency recruiter keeps of the fee

No staffing or search firm publishes the share of a fee its recruiters receive, so this page does not quote one. What the filings show is the direction of the incentive. Korn Ferry attributes the rise in its North American executive search compensation expense primarily to "performance-related bonus expense due to higher segment fee revenue", and Heidrick & Struggles spent 65.1% of its net revenue on salaries and benefits in 2024. A contingency desk works the same way at a smaller scale: a base salary, or a draw recovered from future commission, plus a percentage of each fee the agency collects once the hire starts and the guarantee period runs out. Because the fee scales with the hire's pay, the same percentage earns more on a $150,000 placement than on a $60,000 one, which is why agency desks gravitate to higher-paid roles.

Two rules frame the arrangement. The Department of Labor's guidance defines a commission as "a sum of money paid to an employee upon completion of a task" and notes that "the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) does not require the payment of commissions"; the plan is a contract between recruiter and agency. And in healthcare most agency revenue is not placement at all. The American Staffing Association lists the industry's services as "predominantly temporary and contract staffing, recruiting and permanent placement, outsourcing and outplacement, human resource consulting", and counts nearly 2.2 million temporary and contract employees working for staffing companies in an average week of 2024. AMN Healthcare, a nurse, allied and physician staffing company, reported a gross margin of 28.3% in 2025 (30.8% in 2024): 23.0% in nurse and allied solutions and 27.6% in physician and leadership solutions, with a cost of revenue that "consists predominantly of compensation, benefits, housing, travel and allowance costs for healthcare professionals". That spread between the bill rate and the clinician's pay is what a travel or contract recruiter's commission is drawn from, hour by hour, for the length of the assignment.

How much can an independent recruiter earn per placement?

An independent recruiter is paid the fee itself. The agreement with the client sets the percentage of first-year pay, the guarantee period and when the invoice is due, and there is no agency between the fee and the recruiter. That is the upside. The rest of the answer is what comes off the top:

• Nothing arrives until the hire starts. Contingency fees are "compensated only upon successfully placing a recommended candidate", as Heidrick & Struggles describes the model, and a guarantee clause can claw the fee back if the hire leaves early. An independent recruiter funds every search that does not close.
• Self-employment tax. The IRS treats a contractor who "provides services to other businesses" as self-employed. Net earnings of $400 or more in a year require Schedule SE, and the self-employment tax rate is 15.3%: 12.4% for Social Security and 2.9% for Medicare, with the employer-equivalent half deductible when calculating adjusted gross income. An agency recruiter's employer pays that half for them.
• Split placements. A fee shared with the recruiter who supplied the candidate or the client is divided on whatever terms the two agreed; no public source reports a typical split.
• No benchmark exists. The federal wage survey "does not include the self-employed, owners and partners in unincorporated firms", so there is no government median for independent recruiters, and no filing reports one. Any per-placement income you read for an independent recruiter is one person's account or a sales pitch, not a measured figure.

What can be said precisely is the ceiling: the whole of a fee that, for a retained executive search, averaged $146,000 at the largest firm to report it, and for a contingency placement is a negotiated percentage of the hire's annual pay. How many of those an independent recruiter closes in a year is the number that decides their income, and it depends on the same thing an in-house team's cost per hire depends on: how many qualified, interested candidates one person can reach.

What this means for a healthcare talent acquisition team

"How much do recruiters make per hire" is, for a hiring leader, a cost-per-hire question with two answers. Through an agency, the cost is a fee per placement that scales with salary and recurs on every hire, and for travel staff it is a margin on every hour. Through your own team, it is a salary spread over the hires each recruiter can close, so the lever is capacity, not price. Sourcing passive clinicians one at a time is the work agencies are paid to absorb, and it is the work Betterleap's agent does for a salaried recruiter: it searches 35M+ healthcare professionals, checks licensure through 25+ state board partnerships, drafts a personalized outreach sequence, sends it from the recruiter's own mailbox and follows up until the candidate replies, then re-engages the past applicants already in your ATS (25+ integrations). Community Health Network reported a 35% increase in sourcing efficiency and about ten hours a week saved per recruiter; FOX Rehabilitation sources 20% of its new hires through Betterleap and saw a 60% email open rate against 10% with its CRM. None of it carries a per-placement fee. To see what your team could source on its own requisitions, request a demo. For who earns commission and who does not, see do recruiters get commission; for the career view of recruiter pay, the salary guide for recruiters.

Sources

• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: Human Resources Specialists, May 2025 wages and 2025-35 projections, read 13 October 2026.
• U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025 technical notes (what the survey's wages include and who is excluded), read 13 October 2026.
• U.S. Department of Labor, Wages: Commissions, read 13 October 2026.
• Internal Revenue Service, Self-employment tax (Social Security and Medicare taxes), read 13 October 2026.
• Internal Revenue Service, Independent contractor (self-employed) or employee?, read 13 October 2026.
• Robert Half Inc., Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025, filed 13 February 2026, read 13 October 2026.
• Korn Ferry, Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended 30 April 2026, filed 26 June 2026, read 13 October 2026.
• Heidrick & Struggles International, Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2024, filed 3 March 2025, read 13 October 2026.
• AMN Healthcare Services, Form 10-K for the year ended 31 December 2025, filed 20 February 2026, read 13 October 2026.
• American Staffing Association, Staffing Industry Statistics, 2024 figures, read 13 October 2026.
• Betterleap: betterleap.com, case studies for Community Health Network and FOX Rehabilitation.