Free Tools/Downtime Cost Calculator
What does a day of downtime cost you?
Servers down, email dead, phones ringing. Most owners have never put a number on that day. Use your own figures below; the math updates as you type, and nothing you enter leaves your browser.
Your business
Wages plus benefits, per employee
We convert this to revenue per business hour (2,080 hours/year)
How much of your team's work stops
How much of your sales stop while systems are down
The bill
Estimated cost of this outage
$0
- Lost productivity
- Lost revenue
Not included: emergency recovery help, overtime to clear the backlog, missed deadlines, compliance fines, and customers who don't come back. Real incidents usually cost more than this math.
Make this number smallerThe two numbers that decide your downtime bill
Every outage bill is really frequency times duration. How often things break, and how long they stay broken. The calculator above prices duration; here's what controls each lever.
Frequency is driven by prevention: keeping systems patched, monitoring that catches failing hardware and suspicious activity early, protecting devices and email, and training the humans who click things. Most incidents that take businesses down for days were preventable with basics done consistently.
Duration is decided before the incident, not during it. Businesses with tested backups and a written recovery plan restore in hours. Businesses that assumed their backups worked find out otherwise mid-crisis, and that's how one bad morning becomes two bad weeks. If you read ourransomware guide, this is why it leans so hard on the 3-2-1 backup rule and testing your restores.
Common questions
Where do these numbers come from?
Entirely from you. The calculator multiplies your own inputs (team size, labor cost, revenue, and how hard an outage would hit each) using a formula shown right on the page. We deliberately avoid quoting scary industry averages; your business's real numbers are more persuasive than anyone's statistics.
What does the estimate leave out?
Plenty, and it's all downside. Recovery costs (emergency IT help, new hardware, forensic investigation), overtime to catch up on the backlog, missed contractual deadlines and penalties, compliance fines if data was exposed, higher cyber insurance premiums afterward, and the hardest one to price: customers who quietly took their business somewhere reliable. Treat the number on this page as a floor, not a ceiling.
How long do outages actually last?
It depends heavily on the cause and on preparation. Hardware failures with good backups can be hours; ransomware without tested backups routinely stretches into weeks. The honest answer for your business comes from asking: if everything went down right now, how long until we're working again, and has that plan ever been tested?
How do I actually reduce this number?
Two levers. Reduce how often incidents happen: patching, monitoring, endpoint protection, and staff training prevent most of them. Reduce how long they last: tested backups, documented recovery plans, and someone on call who has done this before. That combination is what a managed services agreement is, in a sentence.
Downtime is a choice you make in advance
Monitoring, tested backups, and a recovery plan decide whether your next incident lasts an hour or a week. A free assessment shows you exactly where you stand today.