How much does one hour of IT downtime cost?

The cost of one hour of IT downtime depends on your annual revenue, headcount and IT dependency. For an SMB with EUR 2M in revenue, 25 employees and 70% IT dependency, the hourly cost ranges between EUR 1,000 and EUR 3,000 including lost revenue, employee unproductivity and indirect costs.

How do you calculate IT downtime cost?

The cost of downtime is calculated by adding three components: hourly revenue loss (annual revenue / 1,820 working hours x IT dependency %), employee unproductivity cost, and indirect costs (reputation, stress, estimated at 20% of direct costs). Then multiply by the outage duration and annual frequency.

How can you reduce the cost of IT outages?

Managed services with a guaranteed response time (GRT) drastically reduce the duration of outages. With a 1-hour GRT and proactive 24/7 monitoring, most incidents are detected and resolved before they impact your business. At RDEM Systems, managed services start from EUR 70/month per server.

IT Downtime Cost Calculator — How Much Does an Outage Cost?

1 Annual revenue and headcount

Annual revenue (EUR)

Your annual revenue before tax

Number of employees

Total headcount

2 Assess your IT dependency

What % of your business depends on IT?

Average gross monthly salary (EUR)

Used to calculate the cost of employee unproductivity

3 Estimate the duration and frequency of outages

Estimated downtime duration (hours)

Estimated annual frequency

Your IT downtime financial risk

Cost per hour

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Cost per incident

-

Total annual risk

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Calculation breakdown

Hourly revenue loss -

Hourly unproductivity cost -

Indirect costs (reputation, stress) -

Total per hour -

Comparison with RDEM Systems managed services

Your annual risk

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Annual managed services cost

From EUR 840 (EUR 70/month business hours)

With a guaranteed 1-hour response time, you drastically reduce your downtime and protect - of potential risk.

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How to calculate the cost of IT downtime?

The cost of IT downtime is often underestimated by businesses. It is not limited to the direct loss of revenue: it also includes the unproductivity of blocked employees, indirect costs related to reputation and stress, and sometimes contractual penalties towards your own clients.

Our downtime cost calculator uses a 3-step method to estimate your real financial risk:

Hourly revenue loss: your annual revenue divided by 1,820 working hours, weighted by your IT dependency rate.
Unproductivity cost: the fully loaded salary cost of your employees idle during the outage.
Indirect costs: estimated at 20% of direct costs (reputation impact, loss of client trust, organisational stress).

According to Gartner, the average cost of one hour of IT downtime exceeds $300,000 for large enterprises. For an SMB, this amount is naturally lower but remains significant: between EUR 500 and EUR 5,000/hour depending on the business (roughly $550 to $5,500 USD).

The best protection against these costs is prevention: proactive 24/7 monitoring combined with a guaranteed response time allows you to detect and resolve incidents before they impact your business.

Sovereign infrastructure

AS206014 - Equinix Paris datacenters. Your data stays in France.

1-hour guaranteed response time

Intervention within 1 hour, 24/7. Reduce your server downtime.

From EUR 70/month

Monitoring, maintenance, on-call support. Fixed price, predictable budget. EUR 70 (business hours) or EUR 150 (24x7).

How much does IT downtime cost your business?