Accommodation and food services took on 280,700 new starters in the year to February 2026, and 198,900 of them had not worked at all in the previous twelve months. That is 2.4 first-time workers for every experienced job changer, the highest ratio in the economy, and Skai Solutions reads it as the reason hospitality retention advice keeps failing.
Those are Australian Bureau of Statistics figures, released 31 July 2026. They say something more specific than "turnover is high". They say hospitality churn is mostly people entering the workforce, not people being poached, and a retention plan built to stop staff leaving for a rival is aimed at the smaller half of the problem. Here is what it costs, why it happens, and what actually moves it.
There is no published Australian figure for the cost of replacing a hospitality employee, so rather than repeat a number from an overseas consultancy we will build one from the award and show the inputs. This is our arithmetic, not a survey.
Replacing one front of house casual on the Restaurant Industry Award MA000119, at the rates applying from the first full pay period on or after 1 July 2026:
| Item | Rate | Hours | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Supervisor time on induction and floor training (Level 5 casual) | A$39.13 an hour | 8 | A$313.04 |
| The new starter's own paid hours before they are productive (Level 2 casual) | A$33.85 an hour | 20 | A$677.00 |
| Wages cost of one replacement | 28 | A$990.04 |
That excludes advertising, the manager's time reading applications, the trial shift, and the revenue lost while service is slower. It is a floor, not an estimate. A venue replacing six front of house staff in a year carries A$5,940.24 of it, and none of it appears as a line item anywhere in the accounts, which is exactly why it does not get managed. Our hospitality award pay levels page has the full classification table if your mix of levels is different.
Nationally, no, and this is where most commentary is out of date. The ABS job mobility rate for the year to February 2026 was 7.2%, down from 7.7% the year before. One million people changed employer. That 7.2% is the lowest reading in the published series, which runs back to 1972 and peaked at 19.5% in 1989. The great resignation is over as a national labour market story.
The ABS also notes this was the last Participation, Job Search and Mobility survey conducted in its current form, with content moving into a new Labour Supplementary Survey and the first 2026 calendar-year estimates expected in April 2027. So this is the final reading on this basis, which is worth knowing before you compare it with something published next year.
What has not improved is the composition. Here is the ABS breakdown of people who started their current job in the year to February 2026, in thousands, with the ratio on the right calculated by us.
| Industry | New entrants | Changed jobs | New entrants per job changer |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accommodation and food services | 198.9 | 81.8 | 2.4 |
| Retail trade | 179.7 | 96.0 | 1.9 |
| Health care and social assistance | 231.0 | 157.6 | 1.5 |
| Professional, scientific and technical | 102.3 | 115.0 | 0.9 |
| Construction | 85.9 | 124.3 | 0.7 |
Hospitality is the extreme case in the whole economy. In construction and professional services, more people arrive from another employer than arrive from outside work altogether. In hospitality it is the reverse by a factor of nearly two and a half. The industry is the country's on-ramp into paid work, which is a genuinely useful thing to be and also an expensive one.
Three causes, and only the third is about your venue.
Age. The ABS puts job mobility at 12.0% for 15 to 24 year olds against 4.6% for 45 to 64 year olds and 1.2% for those 65 and over. Hospitality employs more young people than almost any other industry, so a venue inherits the mobility rate of its age profile before a single management decision is made. Nothing a roster can do will make a 19 year old as settled as a 55 year old.
Life stage, not dissatisfaction. Of the 2.4 million people who started a job in the year, 1.3 million had not worked in the previous twelve months at all. A large share of hospitality departures are people finishing study, moving city, going travelling or leaving the industry entirely. An exit interview will not surface a fixable complaint because there was not one.
And then the part that is yours. Rosters published late, shifts cut without notice, split shifts that turn a four hour day into a ten hour one, and being asked to answer the phone while carrying three plates. Those are the departures worth preventing because they are the ones that were avoidable, and they are concentrated in the 81,800 who left you for another employer rather than for another life.
One job that does not leave when a person does is the phone. Our page on how a virtual receptionist works covers what that actually involves.
Then accept the number and design around it. A venue whose churn is structural, because it is staffed by students in a university suburb, should not be trying to hold people for three years. It should be trying to make week one cheap: a written opening and closing sequence, a till trained in one shift, a phone that does not need a human to answer it, and a menu a new starter can describe without being coached. That turns the A$990.04 above into something much smaller without retaining anybody.
That is also the honest concession on this page. Most of what fixes hospitality turnover is roster discipline and induction, and neither of them is something you buy. If you are choosing between a roster app and a phone agent this month, and your problem is that rosters go out on a Saturday for a Monday, buy the roster app.
Where Skai Solutions helps is narrow and specific: it removes one job from the list a new starter has to learn, and it removes the interruption that makes an experienced one look for a calmer venue. It answers every call, takes orders and bookings into the POS, and it does not resign. Setup takes five days.
One of the cheapest ways to take load off the people you still have is to stop the phone interrupting them mid service, which is the case made on our page about AI receptionists for hospitality venues.
Not on this basis. As at 12 September 2026 no published Stats NZ series gives an industry job mobility rate comparable to the ABS one, so this page does not offer a New Zealand figure rather than borrowing the Australian one and relabelling it. The award arithmetic does not transfer either, because New Zealand has no modern award system: rates come from the minimum wage and individual agreements, which hospitality wages in New Zealand covers, and there is no minimum shift length at all.
Turnover is expensive mostly because of what replacing someone costs in paid hours. How to train restaurant staff prices an induction at the 2026-27 award rates and shows why breaking training into short sessions costs about 2.7 times what the same content costs in one block.
The flip side of short tenure is that the venues who do keep people carry a cost the others never see. Long service leave in hospitality prices it, including what a ten year casual is worth on the Queensland formula.
The sharpest version of the same problem is the one that arrives with no warning. What you can do when a restaurant employee quits without notice covers the one week deduction the Restaurant Industry Award allows, why it never applies to a casual, and four ways to cover the shift ordered by what they cost.
The ABS does not publish a turnover rate for accommodation and food services on its own. What it publishes is a national job mobility rate, 7.2% for the year to February 2026, and industry counts of people who started a job: 198,900 new entrants and 81,800 job changers in accommodation and food services, 280,700 starters in total. Treat any single industry percentage you see online with suspicion unless it names a source.
Mostly because of who the industry employs rather than how it treats them. Job mobility runs at 12.0% for 15 to 24 year olds against 4.6% for 45 to 64 year olds, and hospitality employs more young people than almost any other industry. On ABS figures 2.4 hospitality starters in every 3.4 had not worked at all in the previous year, the highest ratio of any Australian industry, so a large share of departures are people leaving working life or study rather than leaving you.
Skai Solutions puts the wages-only floor at A$990.04 using Restaurant Industry Award MA000119 rates from 1 July 2026: eight hours of a Level 5 supervisor at the A$39.13 casual rate is A$313.04, and twenty unproductive paid hours for a Level 2 casual at A$33.85 is A$677.00. That excludes advertising, management time, trial shifts and lost revenue, so it is a floor and not an estimate.
Nationally the job mobility rate fell to 7.2% in the year to February 2026 from 7.7%, which is the lowest reading in a published series going back to 1972. The composition has not improved: hospitality still draws 2.4 first-time workers for every experienced job changer. The ABS has also confirmed this was the final survey of its kind, with the next comparable estimates due April 2027.
It is one avoidable irritation among several, not the main cause. The ABS data says most hospitality churn is structural, driven by age and life stage. Where phone handling matters is the 81,800 people a year who move from one hospitality employer to another, for whom being interrupted mid-service is a real and fixable complaint, and in making a new starter's first week simpler to learn.