Business
Employee Downtime Cost Calculator
Enter employees, hourly loaded cost and downtime hours to see total downtime cost.
What does employee downtime cost?
Employee downtime cost turns an outage or idle shift into cash: multiply the number of people affected by their fully loaded hourly cost (wage plus employer burdens you choose to include) and by the hours they cannot do productive work. A twelve-person team at £32/h offline for four hours is £1,536 before you count lost sales or overtime to catch up. Loaded cost should match how you already cost labour in budgets — if benefits and tax are missing, the figure understates impact. Use the result when arguing for redundancy, better tooling or faster incident response. Pair capacity planning with safety stock when downtime hits fulfilment, and utilisation context with freelancer utilisation for contractor crews.
Worked example
12 employees × £32/h × 4 h = £1,536 total downtime cost; £128 per person for the outage.
Limits and assumptions
Labour only. Lost revenue, SLA penalties and recovery overtime are outside the product unless folded into the hourly rate.
Frequently asked questions
What is loaded hourly cost?
Loaded (or fully loaded) hourly cost is pay plus the extras you attribute per hour — employer taxes, benefits, equipment share — not just the sticker wage.
Should I include managers?
Include anyone whose productive time is blocked. If managers keep working elsewhere, leave them out.
Partial downtime?
Use fractional hours or a reduced headcount for people only partly blocked.
Per day instead of per hour?
Divide a daily loaded cost by scheduled hours to get an hourly rate, then use this form.