Downtime Cost Calculator
What an hour of IT downtime costs you in lost revenue, idle staff, and recovery, and what you lose to it each year.
Example scenario—not a forecast or verified benchmark. Enable JavaScript to edit inputs, view charts, save locally and export your analysis.
Example inputs
- Annual revenue
- 5,000,000
- Operating hours per year
- 2,500
- Share of revenue that stops when systems are down
- 40
- Share of stopped revenue recovered later
- 50
- Employees who cannot work during an outage
- 20
- Average loaded hourly cost per employee
- 40
- Productivity lost while down
- 70
- IT recovery cost per hour (MSP, overtime)
- 250
- Fixed cost per incident (data restore, credits, overtime catch-up)
- 2,000
- Outages per year
- 4
- Average hours per outage
- 6
- Annual cost of a resilience upgrade (backup, failover, monitoring)
- 10,000
- Expected reduction in downtime hours from that upgrade
- 60
Example results
Downtime costs you about $1,210 per hour and $37K a year (24 hours across 4 outages); a $10K/yr resilience upgrade would save $7,424 net.
- Cost per hour of downtime
- $1,210
- Expected annual downtime cost
- $37,040
- Cost per outage
- $9,260
- Downtime hours per year
- 24 hrs
- Availability during operating hours
- 99%
- Net annual benefit of resilience upgrade
- $7,424
- Upgrade payback
- 6.9 mo
What stands out
Idle staff drives 46% of hourly cost
Each hour down costs $400 in lost revenue, $560 in idle staff, and $250 in recovery.
Downtime costs 0.74% of revenue per year
24 hours of outages a year (99.04% availability during operating hours) add up to $37K.
Resilience upgrade returns 74% a year
Spending $10K/yr avoids about $17K of downtime cost, paying back in 6.9 months.
Next actions
- Give staff a fallback mode (offline forms, mobile hotspot, cloud copies of key files) so work continues during outages.
- Cut average outage length below 3 hours with a written recovery runbook and a quarterly restore test.
- Fund the $10K/yr resilience upgrade: it pays back in 6.9 months.
Model assumptions & limitations
- Revenue per operating hour = annual revenue / 2,500 hours; only 40% of it halts during an outage and 50% of that is recovered later.
- Idle staff cost = 20 people x $40/hr x 70% productivity lost.
- The 60% downtime reduction from the upgrade is your estimate; fixed per-incident costs are assumed unchanged.
- Excludes reputational damage, contract penalties, and data-loss costs, so the figure is conservative.