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SaaS revenue per employee

We took a look at the employee count and revenue of 77 publicly traded SaaS companies to determine revenue per employee. The data is below and shows a median of $263k. For newer companies that IPO’d after 2018, the median was $245k.

Observations are below:

Correlation is strong. The correlation between employee count and revenue is 0.975 meaning headcount is nearly perfectly correlated with revenue for publicly traded SaaS companies. We’re not surprised to see that a correlation exists, but it is surprising to see how strong that correlation is. That could imply a few things: i) At some point, the ability of SaaS to scale is limited. Like any seasoned business, each new dollar of revenue requires a commensurate amount of sales, support, and infrastructure expense. SaaS is still a great business model, it’s just subject to limits as is any business. Revenue is not ‘free’; ii) SaaS business models are highly predictable, in other words a seasoned SaaS business will have well understood sales, support, and infrastructure costs as the business grows.

The top 10 are really efficient. The SaaS businesses with the 10 highest revenue per employee statistics average $556k, which is 2.1x more efficient than the rest of the data set. Alternatively, the 10 lowest are averaging $164k, which is 40% below the median of $263k.

Publicly traded SaaS businesses are large. The median revenue and headcount of the 74 publicly traded SaaS businesses we monitor is $409mm and 1,495 employees.

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