Downtime Cost Calculator: What an Hour of Outage Costs Your Business

When ransomware, a failed backup or an outage takes your systems offline, the bill is not just recovery: it is the revenue you cannot take and the wages you still pay while nobody can work. Enter a few figures below to see the cost per hour, and what a full outage would run to. This is the number that sizes the business interruption limit on a cyber policy.

Two things drive the figure. Lost revenue is your hourly takings multiplied by the share of sales that depend on the systems that are down. Lost productivity is the wage bill you keep paying while staff sit idle. A phones-and-orders business loses most of both; a workshop that can down tools and catch up later loses less. Adjust the two percentages to match how your business really trades.

Recovery costs (incident response, overtime, replacing hardware, lost customers) sit on top of this and are not included here. Use the per-hour figure as the honest floor when you decide how much business interruption cover to buy, and pair it with your recovery time objective to see how long you could survive offline.