Calculator
Downtime cost calculator
Estimate the true cost of an IT outage per incident and per year, combining staff time, lost revenue and incident frequency.
Written by the 247connect Marketing Team
Enter your outage profile
People unable to work while the system is down.
Optional: revenue that stops while the system is down.
Cost per incident
£3,300
Staff cost plus revenue at risk for one outage.
Annual downtime cost
£19,800
Hours lost per year
18
Staff cost per incident
£1,800
How the maths works
The staff cost of one incident is affected staff multiplied by loaded hourly cost multiplied by outage hours. The revenue cost of one incident is revenue at risk per hour multiplied by outage hours. Adding those two gives cost per incident. Multiplying cost per incident by incidents per year gives the annual downtime cost, and multiplying outage hours by incidents per year gives total hours lost across the year.
This model treats every incident as identical in length and impact, which is a simplification. If your outages vary a lot in severity, run the calculator once for a typical incident and again for a worst-case incident to see the range.
Worked example
An outage affects 20 staff who cannot work for 3 hours, at a loaded cost of £30 an hour each, plus £500 an hour of revenue at risk from an affected online system. This happens 6 times a year.
| Affected staff | 20 |
|---|---|
| Loaded hourly cost | £30/hour |
| Outage length | 3 hours |
| Revenue at risk | £500/hour |
| Staff cost per incident | £1,800 (20 × £30 × 3) |
| Revenue cost per incident | £1,500 (£500 × 3) |
| Total cost per incident | £3,300 |
| Incidents per year | 6 |
| Annual downtime cost | £19,800 |
| Hours lost per year | 18 |
Select any column heading to sort, or filter with the box above.
These example figures are illustrative only. Use your own numbers in the calculator above.
Frequently asked questions
- What is 'revenue at risk per hour' meant to capture?
- It is any revenue that stops or is put at risk while the affected system is down, separate from staff time — for example a website or point-of-sale system that cannot take orders. Set it to zero if the outage only affects internal productivity.
- How do I estimate affected staff and loaded hourly cost?
- Count the people who cannot do their job while the affected system is down, and use a fully loaded hourly cost, not just salary divided by hours. Loaded cost typically includes salary, National Insurance, pension and overheads, and is usually 1.2 to 1.4 times base salary.
- Why does the calculator ask for incidents per year separately from outage hours?
- A single figure hides whether your problem is long individual outages or frequent short ones. Entering both lets you see the cost of one incident and the annual cost of your current incident rate, so you can judge whether to invest in faster resolution or fewer incidents.
- Does this include reputational or customer-trust costs?
- No. Those costs are real but hard to quantify reliably, so this calculator sticks to measurable staff time and direct revenue at risk. Treat the output as a conservative floor, not a ceiling, on the true cost of downtime.
- How does faster remote access reduce downtime cost?
- Downtime cost calculators are usually most useful for justifying tools that shorten outage hours: the fewer hours a system is down per incident, the lower the cost per incident, all else being equal. Re-run the calculator with a lower outage-hours figure to see the effect of faster remediation.
Shortening the outage window
The main lever in this calculation is outage hours. Being able to reach an affected device or server the moment an alert fires, rather than waiting for someone to travel to it, is one of the more direct ways to shrink that figure. 247connect sessions typically connect in around eight seconds over an AES-256 encrypted, zero-trust connection, with unattended access to managed devices for exactly this kind of incident response.