Outplacement Cost Per Employee: What the Price Is Made Of

Outplacement is one of the few services a company buys where the buyer rarely sees a price list. Two large providers publish rate cards; nearly everyone else quotes privately. That leaves an HR or finance lead pricing a layoff with a handful of public numbers and a lot of guesswork.

This guide lays out the public numbers, explains what actually drives the cost per employee, and shows how to price the one component every departing employee uses: the resume.

The published numbers

As of 2026, two large providers publish rate cards. One of them lists these tiers:

• Entry tier: about $900 per employee. On the published card it bundles a set number of coaching calls, a resume-builder tool, a critique of the employee’s existing resume, and job-search platform access. The resume is not rewritten.
• Custom-written resume plus coaching: about $1,900 to $2,600 per employee. A writer produces the resume and the employee gets unlimited coaching calls for the tier’s term.
• Executive tiers: from about $6,500 per employee upward.

The other provider’s published card has no critique tier. It starts at $2,400 per employee, with a professional program at $5,200. Below those two published cards, smaller firms and newer AI-first services advertise per-employee prices from a few hundred dollars up, and those prices are marketing claims we have not verified.

We do not name providers in a comparison, and we do not claim their numbers are wrong. They are the price of the bundle they sell.

What the price is made of

An outplacement package is a bundle, and the per-employee price is the sum of its parts. Knowing the parts is what lets you decide which ones to buy.

Coaching hours. The biggest single driver. A package with six coaching sessions costs more than one with two, and executive packages are mostly coaching. Many providers staff coaching with contractors paid per session, which is why the session count moves the price.

The resume. On the one published rate card that has both tiers, the jump from the entry tier, where the resume is only critiqued, to a custom-written resume is about $1,000 to $1,700 per employee. The higher tiers also add coaching and time, so that gap is an upper bound on what the resume itself is worth inside the package, not a precise price for it.

Platform access. A login to job listings, networking tools, and sometimes interview-practice software, usually for a fixed number of months. This is a low-cost item for the provider and is bundled into every tier.

Account management and reporting. Someone tracks who has used the service and sends the employer a utilization report. For a large layoff this is real work; for a small one it is a line item that rarely changes.

Utilization. The quiet variable. The best-documented figure is that fewer than half of the employees offered outplacement ever use it, and that figure is dated enough that we treat it as a caution, not a fact. If a provider claims a much higher engagement rate, ask how it was measured.

What the resume piece should include

If a written resume is a large part of what separates one tier from the next, the written resume has to be worth it. A resume that reformats the old one in a new font is not. Here is the standard to hold it to.

It works backwards from what the person actually did. A 15-year employee has stopped noticing what they know. The machines, the standards, the systems, and the people they trained have become routine and never made it onto the page. The resume work is finding those things, not restyling the ones already there.

Every item we propose is a question the person answers, and a reviewer approves it before it goes on the resume. Each suggested line is shown to the employee as a question, and your reviewer approves, edits, or drops it based on the answer. This is what makes the resume theirs, and what keeps a program honest at volume.

Credentials are never assumed. A license or certification is asked about, never written from a job title, and anything uncertain waits for a reviewer.

It reads cleanly to screening software. Single column, standard headings, no graphics, so the first applicant tracking system it meets does not scramble it.

Here is the difference on one line. This is a sample worker, not a real person.

Before: “Customer service representative. Handled calls and resolved issues.”

After: “Customer service representative for a regional utility, 9 years: handled about 80 calls a day in Salesforce Service Cloud, resolved billing disputes up to $2,500 without escalation, trained 4 new hires on the call-handling standard, and held a 94% first-call resolution rate over the last 2 years.”

Nothing in the second version was added that was not already true. The person had done all of it; it had simply become invisible to them. A critique of the first line would have said “add detail.” A rewrite in a new template would have kept the first line.

Pricing the resume separately

Once you know what the resume piece is worth inside a package, you can price it on its own.

A per-person resume service, done to the standard above, costs far less than the tier gap on that published rate card, because it does not carry coaching hours or platform access. For comparison, several state vocational rehabilitation agencies publish what they pay outside vendors per person for resume and job-readiness deliverables, and those published rates run from about $100 per person for a basic resume to about $700 for job-readiness training, depending on the state. Those are government-set prices for a comparable service, and they are the most honest public floor we know of.

AdaptiveResume for organizations is priced per person, by quote, sized to your volume. We do not publish a list price because volume changes it, but we will tell you the number on a short call.

Three ways employers actually buy

The full program for everyone. This is the right choice when most of the people leaving are long-tenured, the severance agreement names a program, or the employer needs a usage report for every person. Expect the published per-employee range.

The full program for some, a resume service for the rest. The common shape for a mixed group. Long-tenured or senior people get coaching; everyone gets a resume done to the standard above. The blended cost per employee drops sharply and nobody leaves without the one thing they will use that week.

A resume service for everyone, coaching on request. This is the right choice for a small layoff where people were recently in the market anyway. Offer a coaching stipend to anyone who asks, and pay for it only when it is used.

What to ask any provider

1. What is the per-employee price, and what is in it? Ask for the components separately.
2. Is the resume critiqued, rewritten from a template, or rebuilt from the person’s real work history?
3. Is every item checked with the employee and approved before it is final? How is that recorded?
4. How are licenses and certifications handled? Are they ever written without confirmation?
5. What do you report back to us, and does it include anything that sounds like a placement promise?

A provider who cannot answer the second and fourth questions plainly is selling formatting.

What we offer

You send the batch of resumes. During a pilot we handle intake for you. Each resume is rebuilt from the person’s real history; the person answers questions about their own work, a reviewer you name approves every suggested line from those answers, and anything that looks like a credential is held for sign-off. You get finished resumes that screening software reads cleanly, plus a per-person record of what was reviewed and confirmed. Pilots are paid at standard rates and fully credited against your first contract.

Format notes

Two pages is normal once a person has more than one substantive role. Reverse chronological order, a single column, and no photos or graphics. For anyone applying to federal jobs, applications through USAJOBS cap at two pages as of the September 2025 Office of Personnel Management (OPM) change.

The Outplacement Resume QA Checklist below is the standard we hold every resume to. Use it to check any provider’s work, including ours, and request a per-person quote when you have a head count and a date. We never add a credential nobody confirmed, and we never promise anyone a job.