Our survey report (subscription required) covers both the costs of running the HR department itself (that is to say, HR staff salaries, information costs and so on), and the wider cost of HR activities within the organisation as a whole.

Having obtained a total figure for each HR department, we then divided this top level figure, in the case of the HR department budget by the number of HR staff, and in the case of the wider activities budget by the number of employees in the whole organisation.

On the first measure, we found that the median annual spend was some £44,000 per head of HR staff. Don't forget, this includes HR salaries, which inevitably make up the largest part of the spend.

On the second measure, we found a median annual spend of £876.19p per employee. This includes recruitment, training and similar costs, and the cost of the HR department itself, but excludes the general salaries budget.

The report contains lots more data, broken down by broad sector (manufacturing and production, private sector services, and public services) and by organisation size. It also looks at:
• anticipated changes in HR budgets;
• the development and implementation of HR strategic plans; and
• measures of HR effectiveness.