Key takeaways:
- More than four in 10 agencies (42%) lost revenue in 2025, and 69% of those expect to grow again this year.
- Of five public staffing firms, two carry heavy client concentration, and both grew more concentrated during 2025.
- Your company-wide numbers can show no client above 10% while one division has a client at 17%.
More than four in 10 staffing agencies (42%) lost revenue in 2025, and 69% of those agencies expect an increase for 2026, according to our 2026 State of Staffing Benchmarking Report. Asked to name their single biggest challenge, 31% described demand softness or client acquisition, the top themed answer in the survey.
Selling more into an existing account costs less than winning a new one. And every dollar of that work puts a larger share of your revenue with the same few clients.
Concentration rose at the two firms already carrying the most
Public staffing companies have to report customer concentration, so their filings give you a peer benchmark.
RCM Technologies, a $319.4 million specialty staffing firm, closed its fiscal year in January with two clients above 10% of consolidated revenue, at 20.8% and 13.6%. Its five largest customers accounted for 51.0% of revenue, up from 48.5% a year earlier. The ten largest reached 64.9%, up from 60.1%, and the twenty largest reached 75.0%, up from 70.6%.
TrueBlue experienced the same trend, but at a slower pace. Its ten largest clients held 26.2% of revenue in fiscal 2025, against 22.4% in 2024 and 20.5% in 2023.
Kelly Services, on the other hand, reported its largest single customer at roughly 6% of total revenue, and Robert Half and BGSF both reported no customer above 10%. Concentration builds from ordinary growth decisions. Among these five firms, it increased at the two that already had the most.
A clean company number can conceal a 17.3% client
At the company level, no single TrueBlue client reached 10% of total revenue in fiscal 2025, 2024, or 2023. But one level down, a single client accounted for 17.3% of its PeopleSolutions segment revenue in fiscal 2025, and another had 11.4% of PeopleManagement in 2024 and 12.3% in 2023.
So if you manage more than one division, vertical, or branch, the company-wide number will look safer than your most at-risk division. A client at 6% of company revenue can be a third of one branch’s book. If that client leaves, the branch loses a third of its work with little impact on overall company-level reporting.
A client at a fifth of revenue can be all of your operating profit
To illustrate how this works, take a $20 million agency with a 25% gross margin. That’s about where many State of Staffing respondents fell, since 38% of the agencies that track margin reported between 20% and 29% and another 31% reported between 10% and 19%. That produces $5 million of gross profit. If overhead is at $4 million, you’re left with $1 million of operating profit.
Now imagine losing a client worth 20% of revenue. You give up $4 million in billings and $1 million in gross profit. Your gross margin percentage doesn’t change, so any dashboard tracking margin as a percentage still looks okay. But overhead doesn’t fall on the same schedule. You can redeploy or release recruiters over a quarter or two, while the branch lease, the back office, and the ATS contract still cost the same.
That client was 20% of revenue and 100% of operating profit.
Your biggest client by revenue might not be your biggest by gross profit
If you rank clients by revenue, an MSP account might look like a direct account of the same size. Two clients each bill $2 million. The MSP account has a 12% margin and contributes $240,000 of gross profit. The direct account is at 32% and contributes $640,000. They’re on the same line of a revenue report and nearly three times apart on the line that covers your overhead.
Your existing revenue ranking won’t show that difference. So pull gross profit by client for the trailing 12 months, sort it, and read the top three as a percentage of total gross profit rather than of billings. Then look at how many of your recruiters spend most of their week inside those accounts, as that’s the capacity you’d need to redeploy on short notice.
Those who don’t track gross margin yet won’t be able to calculate this. And even where margin is tracked at the company level, splitting it by client usually means pulling from the ATS and the accounting system separately and matching them by hand. Depending on how your systems are set up, that can be a quarter’s worth of cleanup rather than an afternoon.
The public filings come out once a year and they’ll tell you what concentration looks like at scale. Your own billing system can show you the same number every month. If your growth plan is more work from the accounts you already serve, watch what share of gross profit your top three hold, and whether it’s higher than last quarter.
