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Downtime has a price. Most businesses have never worked it out.

Every hour your systems are unavailable, you are still paying salaries, still carrying overhead, and no longer earning revenue. This calculator prices that hour using your own numbers, then adds the work your team would have to repeat. It takes about a minute and nothing you enter leaves your browser.

Run the calculator See the methodology
60 sec to a defensible number
In-browser nothing is sent to us
PDF export for your board pack
AUD built for Australian businesses
The calculator

Price your next outage before it happens.

Enter what you know. Where you are unsure, leave the default. The figures update as soon as you calculate, and every input is explained in the methodology below so you can defend the number in a board paper.

Data & backup How much data you would need back, and how far back the last copy sits.
File servers, line-of-business databases and anything the business cannot operate without.
Sets the gap between recovery points. The wider the gap, the more work is lost.
Restore throughput How fast the data can physically come back down the wire.
Use the real throughput you achieve, not the plan speed. This drives the recovery time estimate.
Response & tolerance How long before someone starts, and how much repeated work you can absorb.
In minutes. The clock is already running before anyone touches the problem.
In hours. This is your Recovery Point Objective expressed in plain terms.
Business information What an hour of your business is worth when nobody can work.
40
Everyone whose work stops when the systems stop, including part-time staff.
AUD, before overhead. Use your blended average across the business.
AUD. Superannuation, licensing, equipment, floor space and insurances.
AUD. Used to price the revenue you are not earning while systems are down.
A note on precision. This model is deliberately conservative and bandwidth-bound. It assumes a clean restore over a single link, with no queueing, no prioritisation trade-offs, no third-party dependencies and no application-level rebuild. Real outages rarely behave that politely. Treat the output as the floor, not the ceiling.
Methodology

How the number is built.

Nothing here is a black box. Every figure the calculator returns comes from one of six formulas, all of them auditable, all of them using inputs you supplied.

  1. Fully loaded hourly cost per employee

    Salary alone understates what an idle employee costs. Overhead, superannuation, licensing and floor space are all still being paid.

    (Salary + Overhead) ÷ 2,080

  2. Revenue forgone per hour

    Annual revenue spread evenly across the working year. A blunt instrument, but a defensible one for a first-pass estimate.

    Annual Revenue ÷ 2,080

  3. Total cost per hour down

    Idle labour across the whole business plus the revenue not being earned while systems are unavailable.

    ((Salary + Overhead) × Employees + Revenue) ÷ 2,080

  4. Restore time

    The data volume converted to megabits, divided by the throughput of the link the restore runs over. Returns hours.

    (GB × 8,000) ÷ (Mbps × 3,600)

  5. Cost of downtime

    Total time unavailable is the response delay plus the restore, priced at your hourly cost of being down.

    (Response Time + Restore Time) × Hourly Cost

  6. Cost of repeated work

    Work completed after the last good backup is gone and has to be done again. Priced at the same hourly rate.

    Hours To Redo × Hourly Cost
Why 2,080 hours? A standard full-time working year is 40 hours per week across 52 weeks, which is 2,080 hours. Dividing annual salary, overhead and revenue by 2,080 converts annual figures into an hourly rate that can be multiplied by outage duration. If your business runs extended hours or shift work, the true hourly cost is higher than this model returns.
What to do with the number

A figure is only useful if it changes something.

Once you know the hourly cost of being down, the resilience conversation stops being philosophical. Recovery objectives become a commercial decision with a price attached, and the three levers that move the number are all engineerable.

Shorten the restore

The lever: recovery architecture. Restoring across a wide-area link is the slowest possible option. Local instant virtualisation boots the most recent clean snapshot in minutes rather than transferring terabytes, which collapses the largest term in the formula.

Cloud backup & disaster recovery

Shorten the response

The lever: monitoring and service levels. Every minute before someone starts work is charged at the full hourly rate. Proactive monitoring means the incident is detected and triaged before a user raises it, and a contracted response time makes that measurable.

Service desk & NOC

Close the exposure window

The lever: backup frequency and evidence. A nightly backup means up to a full day of work is at risk. Tightening the recovery point and proving the restores actually work is also what auditors, insurers and boards now ask to see documented.

Compliance & security auditing
Frequently asked

Questions about the model.

What the calculator does, what it deliberately leaves out, and how far you can lean on the result.

  1. Q1

    How is the cost of downtime calculated?

    Three components are added together. Idle labour is every employee's fully loaded hourly cost, being annual salary plus overhead divided by 2,080 hours, multiplied by headcount. Lost revenue is annual revenue divided by 2,080 hours. Repeated work is the hours of work you are willing to lose and redo, priced at the same hourly rate. Total time down is the response delay plus the restore time.

  2. Q2

    Why divide by 2,080 hours?

    2,080 is the standard full-time working year: 40 hours per week across 52 weeks. Dividing annual salary, overhead and revenue by 2,080 converts annual figures into an hourly rate that can be multiplied by outage duration. If your business runs shift work or extended trading hours, your true hourly cost sits above what this model returns.

  3. Q3

    How is recovery time estimated?

    Recovery is modelled as a data transfer: the volume of protected data converted to megabits, divided by the throughput of the link the restore runs over, using (GB × 8,000) ÷ (Mbps × 3,600). It is bandwidth-bound and deliberately excludes queueing, prioritisation decisions, third-party dependencies and application-level recovery, all of which extend real-world recovery. This is why appliance-based recovery, which boots a local snapshot instead of transferring it, produces such a different outcome.

  4. Q4

    What is the difference between RTO and RPO?

    RTO, the Recovery Time Objective, is how long the business can tolerate being down. In this calculator it maps to response time plus restore time. RPO, the Recovery Point Objective, is how much data the business can tolerate losing, measured in time. Here it maps to the gap between backups and to the hours of work you are prepared to repeat. Most businesses set both by accident, as a by-product of whatever their backup schedule happens to be, rather than by decision.

  5. Q5

    Are these figures accurate enough to put in front of a board?

    They are indicative and intended to frame the conversation, not to serve as a formal business impact analysis. The model ignores reputational damage, contractual penalties, regulatory exposure, overtime to clear the backlog and customer churn, all of which push the real figure higher. For a defensible number, a business impact analysis assessed system by system is the correct instrument, and it is part of the disaster recovery design work we run with clients.

  6. Q6

    Does synfo store the figures I enter?

    No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is transmitted to synfo or to any third party, and the PDF is generated locally on your own device. If you would like us to review the numbers with you, the PDF is yours to send.

Now find out how recoverable you actually are.

The calculator gives you the cost. An IT audit gives you the gap. We review what you have in place today, measure it against the recovery objectives your business can actually afford, and hand you the architecture to close the difference. Free, no commitment, no offshore handoff.

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