What Is the Cost of Onboarding a New Employee in 2025

Forget the free coffee and branded pens; the actual cost of welcoming a new employee in 2025 is a figure that will make your finance department queasy.

While SHRM reports that the average cost to onboard a new employee is around $4,700, for the IT world, this is just the tip of the iceberg. 

When you factor in specialized software, high-end equipment, and intensive training, the cost of getting a new employee truly settled and productive skyrockets. 

And to make things more complicated, you cannot cut costs here. A subpar onboarding experience hurts morale, and it hits your bottom line hard. 

Read on as we dissect the hidden and not-so-hidden IT onboarding costs you need to budget for in 2025.

The Unseen Onboarding Price Tag

The visible costs are easy to spot when a new employee starts: a welcome lunch, a company-branded coffee mug, and the hours HR spends on paperwork. 

However, the biggest expenses are often the least visible, and they come directly from the IT department. To equip a new hire in 2025, you must invest in hardware, a suite of software, and the necessary IT hours to integrate the new user into the company.

Hardware and software costs

The initial hardware setup alone can be a significant cost. While a reliable business laptop can be sourced for under $1,000, specialized roles may need machines costing upwards of $2,000 or more. In 2025, you can expect to spend between $1,000 and $3,000 on hardware and equipment for each new hire.

Then there’s software. The average business utilizes around 106 different SaaS applications, with enterprise companies spending an average of $4,830 per employee annually on these licenses alone.

This figure is climbing, with major vendors like Microsoft, Google, and others implementing price increases ranging from 6% to over 80%. 

The complexity doesn't stop at provisioning these accounts; you also have to ensure the right permissions are assigned for both productivity and security. This process of provisioning and its counterpart, deprovisioning, is a big drain on IT resources. 

For an organization with 1,000 employees, the tasks related to managing user access can equate to the workload of two full-time employees.

Inefficient processes delay a new hire's time-to-productivity and also open the door to security vulnerabilities and wasted spending on unused licenses.

The costs of IT time and security

The tangible expenses of hardware and software are just the beginning of the story. The true depth of IT onboarding costs becomes apparent in the hours your IT team spends, the critical need for security integration, and the inevitable productivity lag as new hires adjust to their roles.

These "soft" costs are far more substantial than most organizations realize and are a drain on resources if not managed effectively.

The manual labor involved in setting up a new user is the  biggest culprit. For every new employee, IT staff can spend hours on repetitive but essential tasks. 

This time expenditure is compounded by the security and training layers required these days:

• Cybersecurity indoctrination: Every new employee could be a security risk. Comprehensive training on phishing, password hygiene, and company-specific security protocols is a must. This involves the cost of training materials and the time taken from both the IT trainer and the new hire.

• Access control and provisioning: You must provision access to dozens of applications and make sure the employee has everything they need, but nothing they don’t — a principle known as "least privilege." This is time-consuming but important for preventing data breaches.

• Loss of productivity: The onboarding process directly impacts how quickly a new hire can become a productive member of the team. 43% of new hires have to wait more than a week just for their workstation and tools to be ready. This delay is a direct cost to you in the form of lost output from a fully salaried employee.

The Grand Total: Your Onboarding Bill

While the costs can vary based on the employee's role and your specific technology stack, we still have to calculate a baseline for effective budgeting.

Let's break down a conservative estimate for a single employee in 2025. The table below breaks down the costs of hardware, software, the IT labor required for setup and security and the initial productivity dip. 

This total of around $8,000 is the direct IT investment before an employee can even begin to contribute meaningfully. 

If you’re hiring at scale, this figure should remind you of the financial importance of an efficient and organized onboarding process. 

Every hour saved through automation and every software license that is promptly provisioned and tracked translates into substantial, measurable cost savings for the business. This makes optimizing the IT onboarding workflow a critical financial and operational need.

How Variables Shape Your Spending

Of course, that $8,000 price tag we just discussed is not a universal constant. It’s merely a starting point on a sliding scale and is influenced by a lot of factors. 

The final tally on your onboarding bill is highly dependent on your company’s structure and processes. 

For instance, is your new hire remote? The rise of hybrid work means you must now factor in the logistics and costs of securely packaging and shipping potentially thousands of dollars' worth of equipment. This adds a direct shipping expense and demands more IT coordination to ensure the employee can set everything up successfully at home.

At the same time, a highly optimized onboarding flow can dramatically reduce your costs. If you implement an automated system that creates a new hire’s profile once and provisions all necessary software accounts automatically before their first day, the productivity loss cost, estimated at over $1,000, practically vanishes. 

The lesson is that you need to focus on implementing smarter, more cost-effective onboarding practices to move your organization towards the lower end of the spending scale. Here’s a few:

• Use automation: Utilize onboarding platforms to automate repetitive tasks like account creation and permission assignments. This frees up countless IT hours and lets your team to focus on more value-focused work. 

• Standardize with checklists: Create role-based onboarding checklists. A new software engineer will have different needs than a sales representative. Standardizing their IT kits and access requirements can make the process consistent and prevents costly last-minute errors.

• Leverage pre-boarding: Don't wait for day one. Ship equipment and provision essential access in the week leading up to the start date. This pre-boarding phase is the single most effective way to eliminate the initial productivity lag.

• Take control of your SaaS licenses: Implement a robust SaaS management tool. This gives you a clear view of who is using what and lets you reallocate licenses from departed employees and avoid paying for unused accounts, a common source of hidden costs.

How Workwize Shrinks Your IT Onboarding Bill

Workwize transforms the complex, multi-vendor onboarding process into a streamlined, zero-touch system. It ships pre-configured devices quickly, provisions access through your HRIS and MDM, and completes the loop on retrieval and ITAD. The result is fewer IT hours, faster day-one readiness, and a lower total cost per hire.

Where the savings come from

• Hardware procurement without premiums. Buy or rent locally to cut customs, long-haul shipping, and delays. Standardize kits across roles and regions.

• Day-one-ready devices. Global delivery in 5–7 days, express in 1–2. Devices ship to home, office, or warehouse already enrolled in your MDM so employees can start immediately.

• Automated onboarding workflows. Connect HRIS, SSO, and MDM to trigger standardized flows. IT gets one dashboard for orders, tracking, repairs, and buffer stock.

• Less manual IT time. Consolidate ordering, approvals, and asset tracking with centralized monthly invoicing. Customers report saving up to 40 hours per month on manual tasks.

• Lower productivity lag. Preboarding with buffer stock and MDM enrollment means new hires get equipment and access before day one.

• Tight offboarding and reuse. Automated comms, certified data erasure, local pickup, storage, and redistribution keep you secure and reclaim licenses and hardware value.

FAQs

What about when an employee leaves? Are there IT costs for offboarding?

Absolutely. The costs here are less direct expenses and more about the risks of inaction.

Inefficient offboarding can lead to ghost users, creating a significant security vulnerability. It also results in wasted money on unused software licenses. 

A proper offboarding process requires IT time to ensure all access is revoked promptly and licenses are either reallocated or terminated.

How can we measure the ROI of investing in a better IT onboarding process?

The most direct metrics are a reduction in IT labor hours spent per new hire and a decrease in SaaS license waste. 

More importantly, you can track time-to-productivity i.e.,how quickly a new employee begins contributing, which can be measured by milestones like their first code commit or first sale. 

Who should own the onboarding process, IT or HR?

Ideally, onboarding should not be a siloed responsibility. HR typically owns the overall employee journey, from recruitment to cultural integration. IT owns the technical enablement, providing the tools, access, and security framework that enable employees to do their jobs. The most successful companies create a workflow where HR processes automatically trigger IT actions.