What this calculator does
Whether you're new to business & marketing numbers or run them every week, the downtime cost calculator gives the same clean result — with a live chart and a copyable summary you can drop into any doc.
The Downtime Cost Calculator estimates what an outage actually costs your business. It combines lost revenue, blocked employee wages, SLA credits and one-time recovery cost into a single dollar figure — and a cost-per-minute number you can use to justify reliability investment.
How to use the Downtime Cost Calculator
- Enter how many minutes were (or would be) down.
- Add annual online revenue and the hours/year the system produces that revenue (8,760 for 24/7).
- Enter affected employees, average hourly wage and how much of their productivity is lost.
- Add SLA penalties and one-time recovery cost if applicable.
The formula
cost = (annual_revenue ÷ hours_per_year) × downtime_hours + employees × wage × downtime_hours × productivity_loss + sla + recovery
Worked example
1 hour down, $5M/yr revenue, 8,760 hr/yr: revenue loss = 5,000,000 / 8,760 = $570.78. 25 employees × $45 × 1 hr × 70% = $787.50. + $0 SLA + $2,000 recovery → $3,358.28 total.
Common mistakes
- Only counting lost revenue and ignoring wage cost — for internal tools, wages ARE the cost.
- Using 8,760 hours/year for a B2B app that only sees traffic during business hours (use ~2,000).
- Ignoring brand/customer trust cost — this calculator gives a floor, not a ceiling.
When to use it
Use to justify SRE hiring, HA architecture, monitoring/observability spend, or to file an SLA credit claim.
Pro tips for the Downtime Cost Calculator
- Change one input at a time to see which lever actually moves the answer the most.
- Round-trip check: reverse the inputs to confirm the formula matches what you'd compute by hand.
- Bookmark this page: the URL and inputs are all you need to reproduce the exact result later.
Frequently asked questions
›How do I estimate productivity loss %?
If people can partially work around the outage (offline mode, other tools), use 40–60%. If fully blocked, use 90–100%.
›What's a typical cost per minute?
Gartner cites ~$5,600/min average for enterprise, but SMB outages often cost $100–$500/min. Use your own numbers.
›Should I include churn?
For recurring-revenue businesses, yes — add the LTV of customers likely to churn as extra recovery cost.
›SLA credits for us or from a vendor?
Both work. Enter what you owe customers as a positive number, or what a vendor owes you as a negative recovery cost.
›How does this relate to MTTR?
Total cost scales linearly with MTTR — halving mean-time-to-recovery halves this number for the same failure rate.
›Does the Downtime Cost Calculator store the numbers I enter?
No. All math runs locally in your browser — nothing is sent to a server, and closing the tab discards the inputs unless you save them to favorites.
›How accurate is this downtime cost calculator?
The formulas match the standard textbook definition shown above. Rounding is applied only for display; underlying computation uses full floating-point precision. For regulated business & marketing decisions, always confirm with a qualified professional.
Embed this calculator
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