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Free tool from Wolferdawg IT Consulting

Downtime cost calculator

When a server, your internet, or Microsoft 365 goes down, the cost is easy to feel and hard to name. This calculator turns that worry into a number you can plan around.

I built this because most owners I talk to in Lawton and Duncan underestimate downtime by a wide margin. They picture the monthly bill for IT and forget the payroll that keeps running while nobody can work. The number below is usually the one that changes how they think about backups and monitoring.

Anyone who cannot do their job while systems are down
Wages plus benefits and overhead, not just take home pay
$
Use decimals for part of an hour, such as 1.5
Roughly what the business brings in during a normal working hour
$
A retail counter may lose nearly all of it, a back office very little
%
Leave blank to see the cost of a single incident only

Enter people affected, hourly cost, and outage length to see your estimate.

This runs in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere or saved.

How to calculate the cost of downtime

The math is simpler than most people expect. Start with lost productivity, which is the number of people who cannot do their jobs multiplied by their average hourly cost, then multiplied by the length of the outage. Use a fully loaded hourly cost rather than just wages, because payroll taxes, benefits, and software seats keep costing you while the work stops.

Then add lost revenue if the outage stops you from selling, billing, or serving customers. Estimate what your business earns in a normal hour and what share of that you actually lose when systems are down. A retail counter might lose almost all of it. A back office might lose very little in the moment but pay for it later in overtime. Add the two figures together and you have the real cost of that incident.

What the number is telling you

If the figure surprised you, that is the point. The cost of a single bad afternoon is often larger than a year of proactive support, and that is the comparison worth making.

The two levers that move this number are how often outages happen and how long they last. Monitoring, patching, and endpoint protection reduce how often. Tested backups and a written recovery plan reduce how long. You can read how I handle both in managed IT services and cybersecurity services, or call and we can look at your environment together.

Frequently asked questions about downtime cost

These quick answers explain how to estimate downtime cost and what you can do to bring it down.

You multiply the number of people who cannot work by their average hourly cost, including wages and overhead, then multiply that by how long the outage lasts. If the outage also stops sales or billing, you add the revenue you lose during those same hours. The calculator on this page does both for you.

There is no single figure that fits every business, because it depends on how many people are idled, what they are paid, and whether the outage stops revenue. A ten person office that cannot work for three hours can lose well over a thousand dollars in wages alone, before you count lost sales or the cost of recovery. Running your own numbers is more useful than any industry average.

No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server or saved by Wolferdawg IT Consulting.

In the environments I support across Southwest Oklahoma, the common causes are failed hardware without a tested backup, internet and power outages, ransomware and other security incidents, and configuration mistakes during changes that were never documented. Most of these are preventable with monitoring, patching, and a recovery plan that has actually been tested.

You lower it two ways. You make outages less likely with monitoring, patching, endpoint protection, and reliable internet. You make outages shorter with tested backups and a written recovery plan so the first hour is spent restoring service rather than deciding what to do. Wolferdawg IT Consulting builds both into the businesses we manage.

Talk through your numbers

If you want to pressure test the figure against your real setup, I am happy to walk through it with you. Call (580) 956-8424, email [email protected], or book a call.

Book a 30 minute call