Cost of Downtime Calculator

The calculator multiplies the number of affected employees by their fully-loaded hourly cost and the productivity loss percentage, then adds any direct revenue lost per hour. That gives a cost per hour of downtime. Multiplied by your estimated outages per year and average outage length, it produces an annual figure. The model captures productivity loss and direct revenue impact — it does not attempt to quantify reputational damage, recovery labour costs or regulatory penalties, which are real but harder to estimate without specific context.

Fully-loaded cost is what an employee costs the business per hour, including wages, superannuation, and a share of overheads such as office space and software licences. A quick rule of thumb: divide an annual salary by 1,600 (roughly 200 working days at 8 hours). For a $70,000 salary that's around $44 per hour — add 20–30% for on-costs if you want a more conservative figure.

The figure is indicative — it is designed to give you a defensible order-of-magnitude number for a business case or board paper, not a precise audit. Real downtime costs vary depending on the nature of the outage, your industry, recovery capability and how quickly staff can work around the problem. Use it as a planning guide and a conversation starter, not a guaranteed figure.

Most unplanned IT downtime is preventable. Our Newcastle managed IT team uses proactive monitoring to catch failing hardware, capacity issues and patch gaps before they cause outages, and we pair that with tested cloud backup and fast recovery so that when something does go wrong, you are back online in minutes rather than days. Send your downtime figures through and we'll show you exactly what a managed arrangement would look like for your business.