Free calculator · instant results
What does an hour offline cost you?
When email, files or your line-of-business app go down, payroll keeps running and revenue stops. Plug in a few numbers to see what downtime really costs your business — per hour, per day and per week.
Cost of downtime
$0per hour
- A 4-hour outage$0
- A full business day$0
- Three business days$0
- A business week$0
This is a floor: it leaves out recovery work, lost data, penalties and reputation.
How we keep you running →Shorter outages, fewer of them
The cheapest outage is the one that never happens. Our 24×7 NOC watches your network, servers and backups and fixes problems before people notice. When something does break, an engineer answers your call in under 60 seconds during service desk hours, and the same local team is on call around the clock for emergencies.
For the big one — ransomware, a failed server, a fire — Managed Care includes managed backup with off-site replication and business continuity with Azure Site Recovery, with restores tested so you know how fast you’ll be back.
Downtime cost questions
How is the cost of downtime calculated?
Two parts. Lost productivity: the people who can’t work, times their fully loaded hourly cost, times how much of their work stops. Lost revenue: your annual revenue spread across business hours, times the share that depends on your systems being up. Add the two for the cost of each hour offline.
What should I use for the hourly cost per employee?
Use the fully loaded cost — wages plus payroll taxes, benefits and overhead — not just the hourly wage. For Pacific-region employers, benefits and payroll taxes alone add about 46% to wages (BLS, June 2026), so expect about 1.45 to 1.6 times the wage once overhead is included. If you’re not sure, the default here is a reasonable starting point for an Orange County office.
What isn’t included in the estimate?
Recovery costs (IT time, outside forensics, overtime to catch up), lost data, contract penalties, cyber insurance deductibles and reputational damage. Those can be larger than the downtime itself, especially after ransomware, so treat this number as a floor.
How do we reduce downtime?
Monitoring that catches problems before users notice, backups you’ve actually tested restoring, a recovery plan with clear targets for how quickly key systems come back, and a help desk that picks up in seconds. All of that is part of Managed Care, including business continuity with Azure Site Recovery.
Customer service first · we re-earn your business on every ticket
Obsessive about service. Relentless about the details.
CAL IT Group brings enterprise-class IT, cybersecurity and SOC 2 Type II–audited operational excellence to small and midsize businesses across Southern California — a customer service organization first and foremost, proven day in and day out for over 10 years.