How Many HRBPs Should You Have at Your Company?

Note: This article was originally published October 30, 2024. It has been updated to include current benchmarks as of June 2025.

There are some corporate skills and responsibilities that will not be disrupted by AI anytime soon. One of those skills is the ability to effectively pull off a re-org. The comms strategy, the frequency and size of the re-orgs themselves, the ability to proactively spot issues before they fester.

These are all skills that make a great Human Resource Business Partner (HRBP) worth their weight in gold. 

This said, other more operational aspects of the HR and other back office functions are incrementally being automated by LLMs and other technology improvements.

This raises two questions:

1. How many HRBPs should you have in this day in age as a function of total headcount?
2. How will these ratio benchmarks change over time as the labor market continues to evolve?

The answer to the second question is difficult to accurately predict. But, for the first question, we can view some benchmarks from Pave’s real-time dataset.

HRBP Ratio Benchmarks by Company Size

7 months ago, we looked at benchmarks across 1,341 analyzed Pave customers of the ratio of full-time employees (FTEs) per HRBP. These benchmarks are only for HRBPs and do not include all of the members of the HR/People function, such as IT or Finance.

The key trend is that as companies get larger, the typical HRBP is responsible for a higher number of employees. This is likely due to the efficiency and effectiveness improvements for HR teams that come with economies of scale.

Given the hypothesis that there are likely some corporate skills and responsibilities that would take much longer to be disrupted by AI—and that HRBPs are one of the relatively “safe” jobs with regards to AI workforce disruption—we wanted to revisit these benchmarks. Now that 7 months have elapsed, let’s take a look at the latest FTEs-per-HRBP benchmarks to help validate or invalidate this perspective.

These findings capture 964 companies with at least 1 HRBP participating in Pave's dataset. And again, these benchmarks are only for HRBPs and do not include all of the members of the HR/People function.

HRBP Trends Over Time: Key Takeaways

1. Across all company stages, HRBPs are more loaded this year compared to last year. This suggests that companies are indeed becoming more efficient in the back office including how leveraged each HRBP is. I would hypothesize that the ongoing adoption of AI tooling is indeed one key driving force here. The transformation in the FTEs-per-HRPB benchmarks from 7 months ago to today is somewhat shockingly rapid.

2. As companies get larger, the typical HRBP is responsible for a higher number of employees. This is likely due to the efficiency and effectiveness improvements for HR teams that come with economies of scale.

Of course, all companies have unique contexts that might require more (or fewer) HRBPs than the reported benchmarks. Additionally, the findings here skew heavily towards the tech sector. Other industries are likely to have diverging ratios from the tech benchmarks reported by Pave.

How does your company’s FTE-to-HRBP ratio compare to these latest benchmarks?

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