Outplacement benchmarks
There is no dependable average, and anyone quoting you one is guessing. What there is, is a clear shape to how this category prices: three ways it gets sold, three quite different per-person ranges, and four questions that tell you which one a quote in front of you actually is.
How the market prices it
If you have gone looking for the average cost of outplacement services and come back empty-handed, that is not you. It is the category. Almost every provider quotes per engagement behind a discovery call, which means the only way to compare is to sit through three sales processes and hope the proposals are structured similarly enough to line up. They usually are not.
Here is the honest shape of what you will find, so you can place any quote you receive. These are ranges we see rather than published figures, and they move with headcount and level.
Altavise publishes the whole list. Every package, including the $499 one, has a certified resume writer reading and approving every document before it reaches the person, and a system that reviews their progress every day. What the higher packages buy is one-to-one time with a senior advisor, not a better version of the paperwork.
Three ways this gets sold
Comparing proposals
If two proposals are thousands apart per person, it is almost always one of these four rather than a difference in the quality of the work.
A frontline search and an executive search are different pieces of work, and level is the single biggest driver of per-person cost anywhere in this market. Make sure both quotes assume the same mix.
Length is a proxy for coach hours committed. Be careful with programs sold as twelve months where the coaching stops after two sessions and the remainder is portal access.
This is where the price gap in the category comes from. A video library and an AI resume tool cost a fraction of a full coaching retainer, because nothing a person produces is ever read by another person. A retainer costs many times more because every hour is human. Both get called outplacement, and the useful question is not which end you are buying but where the human hours are actually spent.
Many programs bill on headcount committed rather than headcount enrolled. If you budget thirty and eighteen take it up, ask which number you are invoiced for. It is the most common way money is wasted here.
Questions
Holding a quote and not sure what it really includes? Send it over, or have us walk you through ours line by line. Ask us.
There is no reliable published average, because almost no provider posts a price. The honest ranges are roughly $250 to $500 per person for a self-serve AI platform, $900 to $2,600 per person for a blended program with some coaching, and $3,000 to $10,000 and up for traditional full-service outplacement, with executive programs running well past $6,500.
Because quoting per engagement behind a discovery call lets a provider price each buyer differently, and because the cheapest tier of the market does not survive being compared line by line with the most expensive. The effect is that a buyer cannot compare two proposals without sitting through both sales processes.
Establish four things for each: the level of the people being supported, how long the support actually runs, whether a qualified human approves the work before it reaches the person or the software is the last step, and what happens to unused places. Two quotes that look far apart usually differ on one of those four rather than on quality.
Altavise publishes its whole list: $499 per person for Essentials, $999 for Guided, $1,899 for Coached and $5,500 for Executive, with volume discounts applied automatically from five people. Every document at every tier is read and approved by a certified resume writer before it reaches the person.
No discovery call, no form. Price a program by headcount and level, see what drives the number, and send yourself a fixed quote.
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