⚙️ IT Downtime Cost Calculator
Enter your revenue per hour, how long the system is down, the share of productivity lost, and any recovery cost to see the revenue/productivity loss and the total cost of an outage.
🧮 Cost Out an Outage
What is an IT Downtime Cost Calculator?
It puts a number on an outage. Enter what the business earns per hour, how long the system is unavailable, and the fraction of productivity lost, plus any one-off recovery spend, and it returns the revenue and productivity lost during the incident and the total it costs you.
Use it to prioritise which systems need the highest availability, to build the business case for redundancy and backups, and to set the uptime SLA you demand from an ERP or cloud vendor.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions
How do you calculate the cost of IT downtime?
A common approach multiplies the revenue your business generates per hour by the number of hours the system is unavailable and by the share of productivity lost during the outage, then adds any one-off recovery cost such as overtime, contractors, or data restoration. This calculator does exactly that, giving the revenue/productivity loss and the total incident cost.
Why apply a productivity-loss percentage?
Few outages halt the business completely. Some teams keep working on offline tasks, some processes fail over to a backup, and some revenue is merely delayed rather than lost. The productivity-loss percentage lets you model partial impact — 100% for a total standstill, less when part of the operation carries on.
What should the recovery cost include?
Recovery cost covers the one-off spend to get back to normal: staff overtime, emergency support or consultants, data restoration, expedited hardware, and any compensation or SLA credits owed to customers. It sits on top of the ongoing revenue and productivity loss to give the full cost of the incident.
How does downtime cost justify investment in reliability?
Once you can put a figure on an hour of downtime, you can weigh it against the cost of prevention — redundant systems, backups, monitoring, a stronger uptime SLA, or a more resilient ERP platform. If a single realistic outage costs more than the annual price of mitigation, the business case for investing usually makes itself.