Direct-Hire vs. Temporary and Contract Placement Mix Statistics 2026

What This Page Can and Cannot Show

A true direct-hire-versus-temp/contract dollar mix, the specific ratio this page’s title asks about, was not located on the American Staffing Association’s free public pages. It appears to sit inside ASA’s quarterly Employment and Sales Survey, which requires member access, a gate that keeps the exact percentage split unavailable to the general public.

Rather than inventing a number to fill that gap, this page uses the closest available public proxy, ASA’s own company and office participation figures, framed explicitly as a proxy rather than a direct answer to the dollar-mix question.

How Many Firms Work the Temp and Contract Side

ASA’s own published figures show 57% of staffing and recruiting companies and 76% of staffing offices serve the temporary and contract sector. That gap between the company-level and office-level figures is itself informative: temp and contract work is even more concentrated at the office level than the company level, suggesting many multi-service firms run dedicated temp/contract-focused locations alongside other specialties.

Neither figure is a dollar-volume statement, both describe participation, whether a firm or office serves that sector at all, not how much of its revenue comes from it.

The Occupational Mix Behind Those Participation Rates

ASA’s own sector-profile taxonomy formally names five official staffing-sector categories, not an informal grouping: Industrial, Office-Clerical and Administrative, Professional-Managerial, Engineering/IT/Scientific, and Health Care. ASA’s occupational distribution data then breaks actual placements out across those five: Industrial at 36%, the largest single category, Office-Clerical and Administrative at 24%, Professional-Managerial at 21%, Engineering, IT and Scientific at 11%, and Health Care at 8%. Industrial and Office-Clerical, the two segments most associated with temp and contract work, together account for 60% of the industry’s occupational placements.

That is still a segment mix, describing what kind of work is being staffed, not a direct-hire-versus-temp dollar breakdown. It is a related, useful proxy precisely because temp and contract placements concentrate heavily in exactly these two formally named categories.

Why a True Dollar-Mix Breakdown Is Hard to Find Publicly

ASA’s quarterly Employment and Sales Survey is the most likely home for an actual direct-hire-versus-temp/contract dollar split, but its detailed breakdowns are gated to ASA members rather than published on the association’s free public pages. No substitute public source with an equivalent dollar-denominated breakdown was located.

That gate is not unusual for association-run industry surveys, but it does mean anyone citing a specific direct-hire-versus-temp dollar percentage without a named, public source should be treated with real skepticism.

What This Means for How a Firm Talks About Its Own Mix

Absent a public industry-wide benchmark, a firm’s own internal mix, what share of its own revenue is direct-hire versus temp/contract, is a more useful number to track and cite in a pitch than an unverifiable industry-wide claim. ASA’s participation and occupational figures above are useful context for framing that internal number, not a substitute for it.

Human + AI SDRs can help either side of that mix grow, generating meetings for a direct-hire desk’s new business or a temp and contract desk’s job orders, without needing a public industry benchmark to justify the outreach in the first place.

The Numbers

Sources

The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.

• American Staffing Association, staffing industry statistics
• American Staffing Association, Sector Profiles

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