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Grid & Power Search · Vacancy Cost Report

What an Empty Protection Seat Costs

An open seat is not free while it waits. Enter your own billable rate or delay cost, and compare what a faster fill avoids with a 25% placement fee.

Cost of Vacancy Calculator

Every number below comes from the inputs you set. Start from your own billable rate or delay cost.

Business Model
1
110
$150/hr
90320

Starting value is an assumption; replace it with yours. Modeled at 45 billable hours per seat per week.

14 wks
424
8 wks
320

Intake to start date. Offers, notice periods, and onboarding add time.

18%
040

Your assumption. Set it to 0% to count unbilled revenue only.

Weekly Unbilled Revenue Bleed

$6,750

1 seat x $150/hr x 45

Total Vacancy Cost over 14 Weeks

$111,510

Including the 18% team load you set

Estimated Cost Avoided

$47,790

6 weeks sooner than waiting

Standard 25% Placement Fee

$25,755

On $103,020 assumed first-year comp per seat

Cost Avoided vs. Fee (illustrative)

1.9x

On your inputs, the cost avoided exceeds the fee by $22,035.

Schedule Scoping SessionCall (757) 720-7173

Illustrative calculation from the numbers you enter, not a guarantee of savings or results. Cost avoided counts only the weeks the seat would stay open beyond the search time you set. Fees are 15 to 30% of first-year compensation, with engagement fees starting at $3,500. 100% of engagement fees are credited in full toward your final placement invoice, backed by a written replacement guarantee per your engagement agreement.

Grid Protection and BESS: 2026 Market Report

Interconnection queues and large new loads have put more substations on the critical path than the protection workforce can easily cover. Relay engineers and senior test technicians are the gating trades.

The interconnection queue is enormous

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's Queued Up 2025 edition counted about 1,400 GW of generation and about 890 GW of storage seeking interconnection at the end of 2024. Each project that moves forward needs relay settings, coordination studies and end-to-end testing.

Senior technicians take a decade to develop

NETA requires five years of experience for Level 3 and ten for Level 4, and Level 4 technicians supervise large projects and multiple crews. Too few people are coming up behind the current leads.

Storage has new standards

NERC PRC-029-1, the ride-through standard for inverter-based resources, takes effect October 1, 2026, and NFPA 855 was updated for 2026. Storage commissioning leads now need grid-compliance testing as well as PCS, BMS and EMS start-up.

Platform fluency shortens ramp-up

SEL, GE Vernova and Siemens relays each have their own settings software, and SEL is moving users from AcSELerator QuickSet to SEL Grid Configurator. Engineers fluent in the platform you run need less ramp-up time.

Methodology. Drivers summarize the published sources below. Pay figures on the pay index are cited individually. Nothing here is a survey by Engaged Headhunters.

Sources

  1. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Queued Up 2025 Edition
  2. NETA, Technician Certification levels and requirements
  3. NERC statement on FERC approval of PRC-029-1 (IBR ride-through)
  4. IEEE Spectrum, The power engineering workforce gap
  5. NABCEP, Energy Storage Installation Professional (ESIP)
  6. EIA, Wholesale electricity markets and ISOs/RTOs

Frequently asked questions

What does an open P&C engineer seat cost a substation EPC?

For a firm that bills engineering time, an empty seat is unbilled hours. At an assumed $175 billable rate and 50 billable hours a week, that is $8,750 a week per seat before any overtime load on the team. Your rate will differ, so the calculator uses the numbers you enter.

Why are relay technicians hard to hire?

Interconnection queues and new large loads put more substations into construction at once, and the technicians who lead energizations need ten years of experience for NETA Level 4. Demand has grown faster than the experienced workforce.

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