What share of your offers get accepted, and where the declines are concentrated. The rate on its own tells you very little. The reason mix is the part you can act on. Every number on this page is calculated in your browser and never leaves your device.
An acceptance rate moves around on small offer volumes, and the reason mix only becomes a finding once you have watched it for several quarters in a row. The HRAnalyst™ Workbook is a printable tracker for every calculator on this site, with the formula, the recommended cadence and space for four quarters. Join the list and we will send it, along with new calculators and workforce analytics as they publish.
Formula used
Acceptance Rate = (Offers Accepted ÷ Offers Extended) × 100
Decline Rate = 100 - Acceptance Rate
Total Declines = Offers Extended - Offers Accepted
Compensation Share of Declines = (Declined for Compensation ÷ Total Declines) × 100
Reason Share of Declines = (Declines for That Reason ÷ Total Declines) × 100
Unrecorded Declines = Total Declines - Sum of Recorded Reasons
Every reason count is optional and a blank one is treated as zero. Total declines always comes from your offer counts, never from the reasons you recorded, so the two can never drift apart. If your reason counts add up to less than your total declines, the difference is reported as unrecorded on its own line rather than being pushed into a reason you did not capture. If they add up to more than your total declines, the page stops and asks you to check the numbers, because one of them is wrong.
An acceptance rate moves for reasons that have nothing to do with your process, including how many offers you extend to people you were never going to land. A team that only extends an offer when it is already effectively closed will look excellent. A team that extends earlier and more often will look worse while hiring more people. The reason mix is the actionable part.
When compensation is the largest single decline reason across a quarter, that is a pay position finding rather than a recruiting one, and no amount of process improvement fixes it. Treat location, timing and scope the same way. Each one points at a different owner, and the point of splitting the declines out is to work out who actually has to change something.
If your system only tracks written offers in the denominator, a verbal that gets talked down before it is ever written never appears. Pick one definition, write it down, and use the same one every quarter. Switching between them mid year makes the trend meaningless.
An offer you pulled back still went out the door, and quietly dropping it from the denominator flatters the rate. If you exclude rescinded offers, say so next to the number and report how many there were, so nobody reading it later has to guess.
A decline reason logged from memory two weeks later tends to land on whichever cause is easiest to explain internally, and compensation is often the one that gets quietly softened into something else. Capture the candidate's own words at the moment of the decline, and leave the reason blank when you genuinely do not know. This page will show that gap as unrecorded, which is a far more honest answer than a guess.
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