What does an hour of downtime actually cost you?
Most small businesses have never put a number on it, which is why IT spending feels like a cost rather than insurance. Four figures you already know will give you a conservative estimate.
What an outage actually costs you
Four numbers you already know. Nothing is sent anywhere — the maths runs in your browser.
How this is worked out: idle wages use your salary figure spread over 1,950 working hours a year (37.5 hours × 52 weeks), plus 20% for employer NI and pension. Lost trading spreads your turnover over the same working hours. It is a deliberately conservative floor — it ignores overtime to catch up, missed deadlines, reputational damage and the cost of the fix itself.
Why the figure is usually bigger than people expect
You pay wages either way
Salaries do not pause when the server does. If ten people sit idle for half a day, you have bought half a day of nothing.
The work does not vanish
It moves to this evening or the weekend. That is either overtime you pay for or a deadline you miss.
Customers notice
Phones unanswered, orders unprocessed, quotes not sent. The lost trading line is the part that keeps costing after the outage ends.
Most outages we get called to were preventable — a failed disk with no monitoring, a backup nobody had tested, or a single point of failure in the network. That is what proactive managed IT is for. See also our backup guide and what response times actually mean.
Cheaper to prevent than to recover from
If that number made you wince, a free IT review will tell you where your single points of failure are and what it would take to remove them.
More free tools: PSTN Switch-Off Countdown Cyber Security Self-Assessment Broadband Checker