Free tool

What does IT downtime actually cost you?

When systems go down, the meter keeps running: wages for people who cannot work, and sales that walk out the door. Drag the sliders and watch the bill.

People affected10

Staff who rely on the systems that are down

Average hourly cost per person£15

Wages plus overheads. UK average is roughly £15–£20

Hours down4h

One morning is 4, a full working day is 8

Sales lost per hour£0

If you cannot take payments or orders while down. Leave at zero for office-only impact

How much of the work stops?

How often does this happen?

This outage costs

£0

Wages for stalled work: £0
Lost sales: £0
Cost per year at this rate: £0

Make this number smaller

The interactive calculator needs JavaScript, but the sums are simple: staff × hourly cost × hours down, plus any sales you cannot take while systems are off. A ten-person office at £15/hour losing half a day is around £600 in wages alone, before a single lost sale.

How to make that number smaller

Downtime cost is a resilience budget in disguise. Once you know an outage costs you, say, £2,000, decisions get easy: a backup internet line at £20 a month stops paying for itself the first time it saves an afternoon. The usual suspects, in order of value for money: a second internet connection or 4G/5G failover, tested backups that restore quickly, cloud systems that keep working when the office does not, and spare kit for anything that takes payments.

We cover exactly this in the free 30-minute IT health check: where your downtime risk actually is, and the cheapest way to shrink it. You can alsoscore your wider IT setup in 2 minutes first.