Recruiting Firm Transparency, Fees and Guarantees Study, Q4 2026
Fewer than 1 in 25 U.S. direct-hire recruiting firms publishes its fee. We checked the public websites of 2,228 firms in November 2026.
Transparency: Key findings
| Finding | Result |
|---|---|
| Firms that publish a fee | 84 of 2,228 (3.8%) |
| Firms that publish a guarantee | 335 of 2,228 (15.0%) |
| Firms that describe their fee model (contingency, retained, both or hourly) | 717 of 2,228 (32.2%) |
| Typical published fee | 20% to 25% of salary (medians) |
| Typical published guarantee | 3 months (median); nearly three in four are 3 months or less |
More than eight times as many firms say how they charge as say how much. An employer comparing firms online can usually learn the model, but rarely the price or the guarantee.
Fees: Key findings
When firms publish a percentage fee, the middle of the market is 20% to 25% of salary. Only 84 firms (3.8%) publish any fee at all.
| Published percentage fee | Firms | 25th percentile | Median | 75th percentile | Range |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Low end of the firm's range | 61 | 19% | 20% | 25% | 9.9% to 30% |
| High end of the firm's range | 62 | 20% | 25% | 29.5% | 10% to 35% |
The other published fees are flat amounts, or come with a qualifier such as "up to" or "starting at". We report those firms as publishing a fee but leave them out of the percentages above. Five more firms compare their fee to the market (for example, "below the industry average") without giving a number.
One firm in the study publishes a verified employer-paid fee under 10%.
Fee model
717 firms say how they charge, even when they don't say how much.
| Fee model | Firms | Share of all 2,228 firms |
|---|---|---|
| Both (offers contingency and retained) | 293 | 13.2% |
| Contingency | 269 | 12.1% |
| Retained | 135 | 6.1% |
| Hourly | 20 | 0.9% |
Contingency means nothing is due before a hire, or only a small deposit (under $1,000 and under 10% of the fee). Retained means $1,000 or more, or 10% or more of the fee, is due before the hire.
Guarantees: Key findings
The typical published guarantee is 3 months. 335 firms (15.0%) publish a guarantee, and 214 of them state a clear length we could measure.
| Published guarantee length | Firms | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 3 months or less | 157 | 73.4% |
| More than 3, under 6 months | 11 | 5.1% |
| 6 months or more | 46 | 21.5% |
Lengths range from 48 hours to five years. The market splits in two: most firms stop at 3 months, while about one in five offers six months or more.
What the guarantee covers
Of the 269 firms that say what happens if a hire leaves, 80.3% offer a free replacement. Refunds (4.8%), pro-rated refunds (3.0%) and credits (0.7%) are rare, and 11.2% offer a mix.
109 firms publish a guarantee without saying how long it lasts. Firms that only mention a guarantee, with no terms at all, aren't counted as publishing one.
What this means for employers
While some firms publish their fee structure, rates and guarantees, they account for less than 4% of the market. Most firms will give you their terms only after a sales call. Ask for them in writing before that call:
- What is your fee, as a percentage of first-year base salary or a flat amount?
- Is anything due before a hire? How much, and is it refundable?
- How long is the guarantee, and what happens if the hire leaves: a replacement, a refund or a credit?
- What conditions apply to the guarantee (payment deadlines, notice periods, reasons for leaving)?
- Can I read your client agreement before we start?
- How do you align your incentives (at firm and contributor levels) with your client goals?
Methodology
Every number here comes from terms that firms publish on their own websites, each saved with the exact quote and page it came from. This is the Q4 2026 edition, with pages fetched November 1 to 4, 2026.
- Firms. We started from a list of about 5,100 U.S. recruiting firms, including the 500 largest. The study counts the 2,228 U.S.-headquartered firms whose own website was reachable and showed that they offer direct-hire placement. Firms that share a website with another firm are counted once.
- Pages. For each firm we read about 15 pages, choosing fee, pricing, guarantee, services, process, about and "why us" pages first. We also searched each firm's own website for fee, guarantee and client-agreement pages, including PDF agreements. We identified ourselves as automated research and followed each site's robots.txt rules. Sites that block automated research are reported as not reachable, not guessed: 305 firms (8.8% of the 3,456 with a website found) in this edition.
- Extraction. An AI model read the full text of everything we collected for each firm and recorded a value only with a verbatim quote that supports it. Every quote was checked against the stored page, and values where two readings disagreed went through a second review. Values that failed are left out.
- Own terms only. A value counts only when it is the firm's own term. Industry averages, blog articles and descriptions of other firms don't count.
- Qualified values. Values with "up to", "starting at", "typically" or "as low as" count as published, but are left out of the percentages and day counts.
- Outlier review. A person reviewed every fee at or below 10%, and every guarantee under 30 days or over 730 days. A value passed only with a verified quote, and a fee below 10% also needed an active state business registration for the firm. Rejected values were: average costs from hourly or outsourced-recruiting models rather than a placement fee; a fee cap stated as "typically less than"; a tier label whose footnote we could not read; and a one-day guarantee. Some firms were removed entirely after review: duplicate listings of the same firm on different websites, offices of franchise networks, and sites showing compromised content.
- Repeat. We plan to update the study quarterly.
About this study
This study is research by 123RFP, which is operated by beep! Directed, the company behind #twiceasnice Recruiting, a direct-hire recruiting firm. It uses data from 123rfp.com, a public database of published recruiting terms that we also operate.
Every firm-level value in this study, with its quote and source page, can be checked in the directory. We are in the data: our firm and our sister firm, Rhodes Wolfe, were counted under the same rules as every other firm. Our own published terms are 9.9% to 15.9% of first-year base salary, with an 18-month replacement guarantee.
Firms can request a correction at 123rfp.com/corrections. A correction is made only when the firm's own website shows the change.