Tool
Downtime cost calculator
Support budgets are approved against a number, not against a risk description. This puts an hourly figure on email and file outages by separating lost productivity from lost revenue, so the two can be argued with independently.
| Lost productivity | £3,111 |
|---|---|
| Revenue impact | £2,222 |
| Cost per hour | £1,333 |
| Total, 4 hours | £5,333 |
| A full working day (8 hours) | £10,667 |
Salary cost is divided across 1,800 productive hours a year rather than 2,080, because holiday, sickness and non-productive time are not recoverable during an outage. Figures exclude recovery labour, contractual penalties and reputational cost.
The input that changes the answer most is the dependency percentage: the share of work that genuinely stops when mail and files are unavailable. Finance and support teams sit near 100%, while field and production roles are far lower. Setting it honestly produces a figure a finance director will accept rather than dismiss.
Use the hourly figure to test your recovery time objective. If an outage costs more per hour than the annual cost of the support arrangement that would shorten it, the case makes itself. That comparison is more persuasive than any total-cost-of-downtime headline.
What this doesn't cover
- Estimates are indicative and depend entirely on the inputs you supply.
- Excludes recovery labour, contractual penalties, regulatory exposure and reputational cost.
- It models an outage during working hours; out-of-hours incidents cost far less in productivity and can cost more in revenue.
Questions we get asked
- How do you calculate the cost of IT downtime?
- Multiply affected staff by their hourly cost, scale by how much of their work genuinely stops, then add the share of revenue that depends on email during the outage window. Recovery labour and penalties sit on top.
- Why divide salary by 1,800 hours rather than 2,080?
- Holiday, sickness and non-productive time are not recoverable during an outage, so 1,800 productive hours gives a truer hourly cost than a nominal full-year figure.
- What does this exclude?
- Recovery labour, contractual service penalties, regulatory exposure and reputational cost. It is deliberately a floor rather than a worst case.
Related pages
Want the number reduced rather than measured?
A managed retainer puts a named response time against Workspace incidents, with the recovery path rehearsed and timed before you need it.