Free calculator
IT downtime cost calculator
See what an hour of IT downtime costs your business in lost wages and lost revenue. Enter four numbers and your result appears the moment you submit.
- Labor cost and lost revenue, side by side
- Your result on screen the moment you submit
- No waiting for a call or an email
Trusted by 2,000+ businesses since 1981
- 24/7 help desk
- Proactive monitoring
- Tested backups
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How the number is worked out
Two costs add up during every outage
The calculator uses simple, visible math, so you can check it against your own books.
Labor you pay for anyway
Employees affected × average hourly wage × hours down. People are on the clock whether systems work or not.
Revenue you do not earn
Revenue per day ÷ 8 working hours × hours down. Orders, billable time and sales that stop with the systems.
What the total leaves out
Overtime to catch up, missed deadlines, data recovery and lost customer trust. The real cost is usually higher.
Keep outages short
Most downtime is preventable, the rest can be short
24/7 monitoring
Failing drives, full disks and offline devices are caught and fixed before the business notices.
Backups you have tested
When something does break, systems and files come back from a copy that has been checked.
A help desk that answers
A live service specialist picks up in about a minute, day or night, and starts on the fix right away.
Downtime cost questions
Short answers about the numbers.
Something else? 1-866-363-4628
Prefer to read first? The checklist most of our clients used before they called: how to evaluate an MSP, in 20 minutes.
Get the checklistHow is the cost of IT downtime calculated?
Labor cost is the number of employees affected, times their average hourly wage, times the hours systems are down. Lost revenue is your revenue per day divided by 8 working hours, times the hours down. The total adds the two.
Why is the real cost usually higher than the result?
The calculator leaves out overtime to catch up, missed deadlines, penalties, data recovery work and the effect on customers, because those vary too much from business to business to estimate simply.
What causes most IT downtime for small businesses?
Hardware failures, ransomware and other malware, internet and network outages, failed updates and simple human error. Monitoring, patching, tested backups and a fast help desk address each of them.
What should I do with my result?
Compare it with what you spend on IT today. If one outage costs more than several months of managed IT, book a free IT risk assessment and an engineer will show you where the next outage is most likely to come from.
Find out where your next outage is coming from
Book a free IT risk assessment. An engineer looks at your setup and shows you the weak points to fix first.
