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Calculator · Cost of coverage

What a sick call actually costs your agency.

Put in your staff count, your call-out frequency and your wages. The estimate is built bottom-up from how Canadian care agencies actually run call-outs, and every input is yours to change. The number is yours, not ours.

Your organization
Coverage assumptions, all editable
Statistics Canada, 2023–24 work absence; up from 5.9 in 2020–21
24/7 residential: most shifts must be filled
Interviews: managers reported 10 to 20 minutes per call-out
Overtime is the standing fallback when the pool fails
Last resort: the on-call manager covers the shift
Casuals leave for steadier hours
Conservative attribution
Estimated hidden cost per year
$27,150
About $543 per staff member per year

Conservative: the overtime premium only, the wage difference only when a manager works the shift. Grievance and care-quality costs are not in this number.

345call-outs a year, about 6.6 a week
86manager hours dialling, about 2.3 working weeks

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How the estimate is built

Nobody tracks these costs, so the model builds them from four places the interviews pointed to, and anchors the volume to a measured absence rate rather than a guess.

  1. Manager dialling time. Call-outs a year × minutes per call-out × the loaded manager rate. Paid out of salary, so it never appears as a cost.
  2. Overtime premium. The time-and-a-half on the share of call-outs filled by overtime. The base hours would be paid anyway; the premium is the coverage tax.
  3. Senior staff on shift. When the manager works the shift, the difference between their rate and a frontline wage.
  4. Coverage-driven casual churn. The share of casual turnover you attribute to coverage chaos, at a replacement cost of 16% of salary.
Not in the total: grievance and audit exposure.

Managers told us there is no real-time record of who was called, in what order, or who declined. Under a collective agreement, one arbitrated out-of-seniority grievance can run to thousands in back-pay, legal fees and management time. How seniority call-outs work.

Not in the total: "lockdown".

When a shift goes short, residents cannot go in or out and required responsibilities get dropped. The cost lands on care quality, accreditation and funder reporting, not the budget.

Sources: five interviews with managers and frontline staff in BC social services, June 2026; Statistics Canada work-absence data, 2023–24; sector turnover and replacement-cost benchmarks. Read the full write-up in The Hidden Cost of a 6 AM Sick Call.

Questions about the numbers

Where do the default numbers come from?
From five interviews with managers and frontline staff in BC social services in June 2026, cross-checked against Statistics Canada absence data and sector turnover benchmarks. Every default is an editable assumption, not a measurement of your agency.
Why is the estimate called conservative?
It counts only the overtime premium, not the base hours; only the wage difference when a manager works a shift; and only the share of casual turnover you attribute to coverage. Grievance costs and the care lost during a short shift are left out of the total.
What do you do with my email?
We may follow up once to ask what you found. No newsletter, no list, and you can download the brief without replying.
Can I get the brief without running the calculator?
Yes. Enter your email in the box above and both the estimate and the brief unlock together.

See what a covered morning looks like

Avover offers the shift down your seniority list by text, logs every offer and decline, and updates the schedule itself. Twenty minutes is enough to see it with your own rotation.

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