Cost of IT downtime: Complete UK guide with calculator
UK businesses lose £3.7 billion annually to IT downtime. Get the latest statistics and prevention strategies.
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What this tool does
This calculator helps you estimate the true cost of IT downtime for your business. By entering your employee count, average wages, revenue per hour, and expected downtime duration, you'll get an instant breakdown of direct costs including employee wages, lost revenue, and recovery productivity impact.
All calculations are performed locally in your browser - no data is sent to our servers.
Calculate your downtime cost
Enter your business details to estimate how much IT downtime could cost you. This calculator reveals both the direct costs you see and the hidden costs you might not expect.
Calculate your downtime cost
Your estimated downtime cost
Employee cost
£0
Wages paid during outageRevenue loss
£0
Direct sales/revenue impactRecovery productivity loss
£0
Catch-up period impactTotal incident cost
£0
Cost per minute
£0
Annual risk (SME: 14 hrs)
£0
Hidden costs not included: Research by Ponemon Institute shows that reputation damage, customer churn, emergency recovery fees, and compliance penalties typically multiply direct costs by 2-3x. Your true total could be £0 or more.
Understanding your results
Employee cost
Wages you pay to employees who can't work productively during the outage. This is calculated as: employees x hourly wage x downtime hours.
Revenue loss
Direct revenue your business loses while systems are down. This is calculated as: revenue per hour x downtime hours.
Recovery productivity loss
The cost of reduced productivity after systems come back online. Research shows teams operate at 70% productivity during recovery, with recovery time typically matching the outage duration.
Hidden costs (Ponemon Institute)
Not included in direct costs: reputation damage (35% of total), customer churn, emergency support fees, regulatory penalties, and overtime. These typically multiply direct costs by 2-3x.
UK downtime statistics (2024-2025)
72%
Of UK organisations experienced significant IT disruption in the past 12 months
£4,130
Average cost per minute of downtime for UK businesses
87 hrs
Average unplanned downtime per year for UK businesses (Gartner 2024)
Sources: UK Gov Business Data Survey 2024, Gartner UK Downtime Statistics 2024, Twenty-Four IT Research
When to use this tool
- Budget planning - Understand your downtime risk exposure to prioritise IT investments
- Business case development - Justify spending on backup systems, monitoring, or redundancy
- Insurance assessment - Calculate appropriate cyber insurance coverage levels
- Disaster recovery planning - Set Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) based on cost impact
How this estimate is calculated
This calculator uses a methodology based on UK 2024-2025 research and industry-standard approaches to estimate direct downtime costs. Here's how each component is calculated:
Employee cost
Formula: Employees × Hourly wage × Downtime hours
Represents wages paid during the outage when employees cannot work productively. Based on UK fully-loaded cost research (£20-23/hr average).
Revenue loss
Formula: Revenue per hour × Downtime hours
Direct revenue your business cannot generate while systems are unavailable. This is your hourly rate based on annual revenue.
Recovery productivity loss
Formula: Employees × Hourly wage × Recovery hours × Productivity drop %
Research shows recovery time equals outage duration, with productivity at 70% during recovery (30% drop). This captures the "catch-up" period cost.
Hidden costs estimate
Formula: Direct costs × 2 (conservative multiplier)
Ponemon Institute research shows hidden costs (reputation, churn, emergency fees, compliance) multiply direct costs by 2-3x. We use the conservative end.
Sources
- IHS Markit / Twenty-Four IT: UK average downtime cost £4,130 per minute
- Gartner 2024: UK average 87 hours unplanned downtime per year (enterprise)
- UK Gov Business Data Survey 2024: 72% of UK organisations experienced IT disruption
- Ponemon Institute: Hidden costs multiply direct costs by 2-3x
- BigPanda/EMA Research: Recovery productivity and incident cost patterns
Frequently asked questions
The true cost of IT downtime extends far beyond lost revenue. It includes employee wages paid during the outage (when staff cannot work productively), lost productivity during the recovery period, emergency IT support fees at premium rates, customer churn from service disruption, regulatory penalties (particularly under GDPR), and reputation damage. Research by Ponemon Institute shows these hidden costs typically multiply direct costs by 2-3x, meaning a £10,000 direct cost incident often results in £20,000-£30,000 total impact.
This calculator provides an estimate based on UK 2024-2025 research and industry-standard methodology. Accuracy depends on the inputs you provide and how closely your business matches the assumptions in the model. The calculator is designed to give you a reasonable ballpark figure for planning purposes. For critical investment decisions, we recommend validating the estimate against your specific circumstances and considering multiple scenarios (best case, expected case, worst case).
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is the maximum acceptable time your business can be without a system before the impact becomes unacceptable. Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is the maximum acceptable amount of data loss, measured in time (e.g., "we can afford to lose up to 1 hour of data"). These metrics help you determine how much to invest in backup and disaster recovery solutions. A financial services firm might need an RTO of minutes, while a small manufacturer might tolerate 4-8 hours.
No. While reputable cloud providers maintain high availability (typically 99.9%+), cloud outages do occur. Major incidents like the 2024 CrowdStrike/Microsoft outage affected millions of devices globally, including UK businesses. Additionally, cloud services don't protect against customer-side errors (accidental deletion, misconfiguration), cyber attacks targeting your accounts, or connectivity issues preventing access to cloud systems. You still need disaster recovery planning, backup strategies, and business continuity procedures even when using cloud services.
Research shows the most cost-effective prevention strategies for UK SMEs are: (1) Tested backups - not just having backups, but regularly testing that they work, (2) Security patching - keeping systems updated prevents 31% of outage causes, (3) Proactive monitoring - catching problems before they cause outages, (4) Employee training - preventing human error incidents, and (5) Managed IT services - which prevent 60-75% of unplanned outages. Prevention investments typically achieve 4:1 to 30:1 ROI within 12-18 months.
After calculating your estimated downtime cost, consider these next steps: (1) Validate - does the estimate seem reasonable for your business? (2) Prioritise - which systems would cause the most damage if they failed? (3) Define objectives - set specific RTO and RPO targets for critical systems, (4) Compare costs - if your annual downtime risk exceeds £30,000, prevention investments typically have positive ROI, (5) Start with basics - implement tested daily backups and security patching first, (6) Test regularly - verify your recovery procedures actually work at least annually.
The most effective approaches for UK SMEs include: maintaining and regularly testing backups (monthly recovery tests), keeping all systems patched and updated, implementing proactive monitoring to catch issues early, training employees on IT best practices and phishing awareness, considering redundant internet connectivity for critical operations, creating and testing a documented disaster recovery plan, and for businesses with high downtime costs, partnering with a managed IT service provider. Research shows managed IT services prevent 60-75% of unplanned outages while converting capital costs to predictable monthly expenses.
Acceptable downtime varies significantly by business type and system criticality. For most UK SMEs, acceptable annual downtime is 2-4 hours total (approximately 99.95% uptime). For revenue-generating systems, acceptable downtime per incident is typically 15-30 minutes. For supporting systems, 1-2 hours may be tolerable. The key is to define your acceptable downtime based on the cost impact calculated above, then invest in protection accordingly. If 4 hours of downtime costs £50,000, you know your tolerance level and can justify appropriate prevention investment.
