We had a 3PL account in Gwinnett County running 60% fill rate for three months straight last year. The ops manager called it a pipeline problem. His procurement lead thought it was the pay rate. Our recruiter on the account thought it was transportation. None of them were right. The real issue was a safety certification requirement buried in the client's onboarding paperwork that conflicted with what the job order said. Every candidate we submitted was getting bounced after the conditional offer, not before. Six weeks of scrambling, and the fix was a one-line change to the intake spec.
Fill rate failures are rarely what they look like on the surface.
Fill rate for light industrial staffing in Georgia should run between 85% and 92% at established accounts with a clear job spec and a working intake process. New accounts or new role types realistically start in the 70-78% range while the sourcing pipeline matures. The industry average has been below 65% since 2024, so if your agency is quoting that as a baseline, it's not a benchmark worth accepting.
What Fill Rate Actually Measures
Fill rate is the percentage of open orders or shifts that a staffing partner fills within the agreed service window. If you send 40 shift orders in a month and your agency confirms 34 workers, your fill rate is 85%.
That's the simple version. The number gets complicated fast.
Fill rate doesn't tell you anything about quality or retention. An agency filling 90% of orders with workers who leave in the first two weeks is delivering a worse outcome than one hitting 82% with workers who stay through the quarter. Fill rate is a volume signal. You need 90-day retention alongside it.
Second, when you count a fill matters. Some agencies count it when the worker is submitted. Some count it on confirmation. Some count it when the worker completes the first shift. Those three definitions produce different numbers on the same account. We count on confirmed first-day arrival, because a worker who confirms but doesn't show up hasn't filled anything.
Third, fill rate benchmarks only mean something relative to service windows. A 48-hour window for standard warehouse roles is workable. A 4-hour window for same-day coverage is a different problem entirely. Any benchmark that doesn't specify the service window is giving you half the story. When you compare your agency's fill rate to any published industry figure, ask what window the data assumed.
The reason this matters: 61% of manufacturing, logistics, and construction employers reported in a 2025 study that they expect roles filled within 48 hours, per an Everee-sponsored survey. That expectation has tightened the market. Agencies built around a 5-7 day process will not hit 85% fill rate on accounts where 48-hour placement is the standard.
Georgia Benchmarks by Account Type
Georgia's April 2026 unemployment rate held at 3.5%, a record labor force high, per the Georgia Department of Labor. That's 0.8 percentage points below the national rate of 4.3%. Any benchmark built primarily on national data is probably optimistic for a Georgia operation, because the candidate pool here is tighter than national averages reflect.
For light industrial staffing in Georgia, here's what fill rate actually looks like across account types, drawn from our 27 active accounts:
| Account Type | Typical Fill Rate | Primary Driver | |---|---|---| | Established warehouse (stable headcount, clear spec) | 88-92% | Mature pipeline, returning workers | | Distribution / 3PL (variable, seasonal spikes) | 78-86% | Volume swings, short-notice orders | | Food processing (credential-heavy roles) | 72-80% | Certification bottlenecks, physical demand | | Recycling / MRF | 70-78% | High turnover, physically demanding conditions | | New account (first 90 days) | 65-75% | No established pipeline, spec learning curve |
These numbers come from our own Georgia book of business. They're not aspirational targets or adjusted industry averages. The ranges reflect the actual spread we see month to month, account to account.
For context, the industry-wide fill rate across commercial staffing agencies ran approximately 62% in 2023 and dropped further in 2024, with data suggesting agencies were filling roughly half their orders. Our active accounts with established pipelines and clean intake documentation run well above that average, but it took intentional pipeline development in each county to get there. Posting jobs and hoping doesn't close the gap.
The benchmark that matters for an SLA negotiation is the 85% threshold. Most enterprise staffing agreements include an 85% fill rate floor. If your agency is consistently below that on steady-state headcount (not surge), something structural is off: sourcing, intake, pay rate, or some combination.
Why Fill Rate Varies Across Georgia
This is the part national benchmarks can't help you with.
Hall County, covering Gainesville, Oakwood, and Flowery Branch, runs a different staffing market than Fulton or Gwinnett. The poultry processing sector dominates Hall County's light industrial labor pool and competes directly with warehouse and distribution roles for the same workers. Two distribution centers opened near Oakwood in 2025, and we watched fill rates on a food processing account in the area drop from 83% to 71% in two months. Pay rate didn't change. Intake didn't change. The candidate pool shifted because the competition for workers intensified. No national benchmark was going to predict that.
Savannah runs differently. The Georgia Ports Authority's gravity keeps drawing workforce infrastructure to the coastal corridor, which means the Brunswick-Savannah area has a deeper pre-screened bench for forklift operators and material handlers than most inland Georgia metros. Fill rates on warehousing orders there tend to run 5-8 points higher than comparable accounts in north Georgia, all else equal.
South of Atlanta, Clayton and Henry counties are tough for any role competing with large logistics operators in the McDonough-Stockbridge corridor. Amazon, Target, and Home Depot distribution operations set pay floors that independent manufacturers and smaller 3PLs struggle to match. A manufacturer paying $16.50 per hour in McDonough, with a $19-$20 competitor two miles down the road, will see that math show up in their fill rate every week.
Warehouse and transportation industry turnover ran above 40% annually through 2024 nationally, per labor industry data, and the manufacturing separation rate from BLS JOLTS data ran 26-28% nationally through 2025. In Georgia, separation rates in manufacturing and logistics have consistently run above national averages. That means a pipeline at 90% fill rate in January can drift to 75% by April if placed workers are turning over faster than recruiting can replace them. Fill rate and retention are not independent metrics.
What Drags Fill Rate Below 80%
A few patterns show up reliably when a Georgia account is stuck in the 60s or low 70s.
Spec drift. The job order says general warehouse, but the client screens for a certification that isn't in the order. Candidates arrive, the client declines them, and the agency's system records a decline rather than a fill. None of that shows up in the fill rate report as a spec problem. It shows up as "low fill rate," which sends everyone chasing sourcing solutions for a documentation problem. The Gwinnett account at the top of this post ran this pattern for three months.
Surge without lead time. We had a recycling client in Gainesville call on a Friday afternoon needing 18 additional workers by Monday morning. Their normal weekly headcount was 32. We got them 11. A fill rate of 61% on that order is accurate, but it doesn't belong in the same column as their steady-state performance. Surge capacity is a separate capability from baseline fill rate, and they should be tracked separately on every account that runs more than a 20% volume variance.
Pay rates that haven't been updated. Georgia's candidate market repriced significantly over the past two years. We see fill rates start slipping on accounts where nothing has changed in our sourcing or intake, and the first diagnostic question is always whether the pay rate is still competitive for the role and the county. In a lot of cases, it isn't. Nobody has had that conversation with the client because it's uncomfortable to say "your wages are the problem." But at some point the data says it for you.
One thing we stopped doing a couple of years ago: rolling steady-state and surge orders into one monthly fill rate number on accounts with significant volume variance. The aggregate figure made it impossible to separate structural sourcing problems from surge capacity gaps. Any account running more than 20% monthly volume variance now gets steady-state and surge fill rates tracked in separate columns.
A Fill Rate Scorecard for Light Industrial Ops
Use this to evaluate your staffing partner's performance, or to set your own account-level tracking.
| Metric | Healthy | Caution | Review Needed | |---|---|---|---| | Steady-state fill rate (established accounts) | 86-92% | 78-85% | Below 78% for 4+ consecutive weeks | | Surge fill rate (20%+ volume increase, 24-48hr notice) | 70-80% | 60-70% | Below 60% on any single surge event | | New account fill rate (first 90 days) | 72-80% | 65-72% | Below 65% after 60 days in operation | | 48-hour order compliance | 85%+ | 75-85% | Below 75% on recurring role types | | First-day no-show rate (unfilled after confirmation) | Below 6% | 6-10% | Above 10% |
The last row matters as much as fill rate itself. An account showing 88% fill rate with a 12% first-day no-show rate is delivering effective coverage closer to 78%. Count confirmed arrivals, not confirmations, and the number is honest.
For a staffing partner, the right response when fill rate drops below threshold isn't an explanation. It's a root-cause conversation: is it sourcing, intake, pay rate, or market shift? Partners who can't answer that question within a week of a threshold breach usually can't fix it either.
The staffing KPIs and client retention analysis covers fill rate alongside the other metrics that predict whether a client relationship lasts. The KPI target-setting guide has the process for building account-specific targets from your own baseline data rather than pulling industry averages that don't reflect Georgia market conditions.
If you're running a warehouse, 3PL, or light industrial operation in Georgia and want to know where your fill rate stands against comparable accounts in your county, we can run a benchmarking review against our active book of business. Get Started and we'll set up a 30-minute account review.
