Business Downtime Calculator
Every hour of downtime has a price tag, and most businesses only discover it after the outage. This calculator prices one downtime event: enter your revenue per hour, how long you were down, how many employees were idled, and what they cost, and it totals the lost revenue plus the wasted payroll. If you want the per-hour view instead, our cost of interruption calculator works from that direction, with preset scenarios for IT outages, power failures, and cyber incidents to start from. The two tools answer different questions: this one totals the event, that one prices the hour.
Quick Answer
One outage costs (revenue per hour × hours) + (employees × wage × hours). A store earning $850 an hour, down for 4 hours with 8 employees at $28 an hour, loses $3,400 in revenue and burns $896 in payroll: a $4,296 outage, or $1,074 per hour.
Key takeaways
- This page totals one event. For a per-hour figure with IT, power, and cyber starting scenarios, use the cost of interruption calculator instead.
- Two meters run during every outage: the revenue you stop earning and the wages you keep paying. This tool prices both.
- Use the fully loaded wage (wage plus benefits and payroll taxes), not the take-home rate, or the payroll half will be understated.
- The total excludes recovery labor, SLA penalties, churn, and regulatory costs, so read it as a floor. Every hour shaved off the outage saves the per-hour figure.
- Quick Answer
- How to use the business downtime calculator
- The two meters: how one outage is priced
- Worked example: a 4-hour power cut, verified
- What downtime usually costs, by cause
- What competing calculators miss
- Prevention: what the math justifies
- Frequently asked questions
- Add This Calculator to Your Website
- References
How to use the business downtime calculator
Enter four numbers and click Calculate. Revenue per hour is what the business earns in a normal operating hour: annual revenue divided by your operating hours is the honest way to get it. Downtime hours is how long you were stopped or badly degraded. Employees affected is the headcount standing idle: use the full roster for a total shutdown, fewer for a partial one like a register-only failure. Average hourly wage is the fully loaded cost per employee, wage plus benefits and payroll taxes. The fields come pre-filled with the worked-example values, so pressing Calculate right away shows a realistic result before you type your own numbers.
The two meters: how one outage is priced
Lost revenue = revenue per hour × downtime hours. Wasted payroll = employees affected × hourly wage × downtime hours. Total event cost = lost revenue + wasted payroll. Per-hour cost = total ÷ hours. The first meter is the money you stop earning; the second is the money you keep spending. Together they give the full price of the event, and the per-hour figure is the one you will reuse every time you price prevention.
The $4,296 event splits into lost revenue (79%) and wasted payroll (21%). Most owners feel only the first meter; the second is what makes short outages surprisingly expensive.
Worked example: a 4-hour power cut, verified
A retail store earns about $850 an hour during the day. A power cut idles the store for 4 hours. Eight employees, each costing $28 an hour fully loaded, have nothing productive to do.
Lost revenue = $850 × 4 = $3,400.
Wasted payroll = 8 × $28 × 4 = $896.
Total downtime cost = $3,400 + $896 = $4,296.
Cost per hour = $4,296 ÷ 4 = $1,074.
Enter those four inputs and the calculator returns exactly “$4,296.00 total cost” with “Lost revenue $3,400.00, wasted payroll $896.00. That is $1,074.00 burned per hour of downtime.” That $1,074 is the figure to remember: every hour you shave off the outage saves $1,074, which turns every prevention purchase below into a payback calculation.
What downtime usually costs, by cause
Not all outages are equal. A power cut idles everyone; a payment-terminal failure only stops the register. Match your inputs to the cause instead of using one generic scenario: fewer employees affected for a register-only outage, lower revenue per hour if you can still serve walk-ins.
| Cause | Usually disrupted | Typical duration |
|---|---|---|
| Power outage | Everything: revenue and all staff | 1–8 hours |
| Internet / POS failure | Sales only; staff can do other work | 1–4 hours |
| Equipment breakdown | Production line or kitchen | 4 hours–2 days |
| Staff shortage / no-show | Partial: reduced capacity | Full shift |
| Cyber incident / ransomware | Everything, plus recovery costs | Days to weeks |
Cyber incidents deserve a warning: the table’s duration is only the shutdown. Recovery labor, forensic work, and customer fallout keep costing money long after systems are back, and this calculator does not price those. Ready.gov’s business continuity plan guide walks through exactly this kind of scenario planning, and the NIST contingency planning guide (SP 800-34) is the standard reference for building the recovery side.
What competing calculators miss
Most downtime tools price only the revenue half. A bare “hours times revenue” formula is the classic version: simple, fast, and blind to the payroll you keep paying while nobody produces. Enterprise-oriented calculators go the other way, piling on recovery budgets, reputation percentages, and churn estimates until the result depends more on the guesses than on your business. Per-hour-only tools give you a rate with no event total, so you still have to do the final multiplication yourself. This calculator sits in the middle on purpose: two honest, measurable inputs for each meter, the event total up front, the per-hour figure alongside it, and an explicit statement of what is excluded. What it leaves out is named, not hidden.
Prevention: what the math justifies
Once you know your cost per hour, prevention stops being a vague worry and becomes arithmetic. Compare the annual cost of each safeguard against the outages it prevents, priced at your per-hour figure.
- Backup internet connection
- UPS battery for POS and networking
- Cloud backups with tested restores
- Cross-trained staff for key roles
- Standby generator plus maintenance
- Redundant production equipment
- 24/7 managed IT support contracts
- Secondary location or failover site
A $600 backup internet line pays for itself if it prevents a single 35-minute outage: 35 minutes at $1,074 an hour is about $627 of damage avoided. A $15,000 generator needs fourteen hours of prevented outages a year to break even, which most urban businesses will never see. Run your own numbers through the calculator before you buy. For the bigger financial picture, our business cost calculator shows your full monthly run rate, and the operating cost calculator breaks down where the money goes.
Frequently asked questions
This calculator totals one outage event: lost revenue plus wasted payroll for the hours you were down. A cost of interruption calculator works the other way around: it prices the cost per hour, with preset scenarios for IT outages, power failures, and cyber incidents to start from. The presets are starting points, not your real numbers, so adjust them. Use this page when you want the price tag on an incident; use that one when you want an hourly rate to compare against prevention spending.
Multiply revenue per hour by downtime hours for the lost revenue, multiply employees affected by hourly wage by downtime hours for the wasted payroll, and add the two. In the worked example, $850 × 4 = $3,400 of lost revenue plus 8 × $28 × 4 = $896 of wasted payroll gives a $4,296 outage.
Use operating hours. Divide annual revenue by the hours you are actually open and selling. A store open 60 hours a week that earns $2.65 million a year makes about $850 an operating hour; dividing by all 8,760 calendar hours would give a meaningless $302. Match the hours to the hours the outage actually hits.
Fully loaded cost: the hourly wage plus benefits, payroll taxes, and insurance, which typically runs 25–40% above the paycheck number. Using take-home pay understates the payroll meter, sometimes badly. If you have never built the loaded rate, add up one employee’s total annual employment cost and divide by their working hours.
No. The calculator covers lost revenue and wasted payroll only. Emergency repair labor, replacement parts, SLA penalties, refunds, lost customers, and regulatory fines are all real costs that fall outside it, so treat the result as a floor, not a ceiling. Cyber incidents are the extreme case: recovery and fallout can dwarf the shutdown itself.
It varies wildly by industry, but Atlassian’s incident-management guide uses $427 a minute as a small-business rule of thumb, against about $9,000 a minute for mid-size and large firms. Our example’s $1,074 an hour is roughly $18 a minute, well below that benchmark, which is exactly why you should run your own numbers instead of trusting an industry average.
Divide the safeguard’s annual cost by your per-hour figure: that is the break-even outage time. A $600 backup line at $1,074 an hour breaks even by preventing 35 minutes of outage a year. If the safeguard prevents more downtime than that, it pays for itself; if it cannot plausibly prevent that much, skip it.
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References
- U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Business Continuity Plan (Ready.gov) (scenario planning for outages and disruptions). Accessed October 24, 2026.
- National Institute of Standards and Technology. SP 800-34 Rev. 1: Contingency Planning Guide for Federal Information Systems (the standard reference for contingency and recovery planning). Accessed October 24, 2026.
- Atlassian. Calculating the Cost of Downtime (downtime cost benchmarks by business size, including the small-business per-minute rule of thumb). Accessed October 24, 2026.
- U.S. Small Business Administration. Manage Your Business Finances (cash-flow planning for disruptions). Accessed October 24, 2026.
- U.S. Census Bureau. Statistics of U.S. Businesses (SUSB) (what firms of your size typically spend). Accessed October 24, 2026.
- Internal Revenue Service. Publication 334: Tax Guide for Small Business (deducting business losses and expenses). Accessed October 24, 2026.