$300K+ per hour
Median cost of an hour of downtime for large enterprises, with 98% reporting over $100K per hour (ITIC, 2024).
Cost per hour
What an hour of downtime actually costs.
Estimate your cost per hour of downtime, then read it as cost per minute and cost per day. Enter fleet size, revenue impact, MTTR, incident frequency, and SLA target to turn one hour of outage into a defensible dollar figure.
Scroll for benchmarks
Conversion
One rate, three ways to quote it.
Once you know the cost per hour of downtime, per-minute and per-day figures are simple conversions. Executives usually want per-hour; incident reviews want per-minute; budget cases want per-day and annualized.
Cost per hour
Servers affected multiplied by revenue impact per server hour. This is the base rate every other figure is derived from.
Cost per minute
Cost per hour divided by 60. Useful for MTTR and detection-delay conversations where minutes matter.
Cost per day
Cost per hour multiplied by 24, for sustained regional or data center level outages.
Annual exposure
Cost per hour multiplied by annual outage hours (MTTR times incident frequency), plus the hidden outage tax.
Benchmarks
What an hour costs other teams.
Published benchmarks vary widely by industry and revenue model. Use them to sanity-check your own number, not to replace it. Your calculated rate above is the one to defend in a budget conversation.
$5,600 per minute
Roughly $336K per hour — the widely cited classic Gartner benchmark for enterprise downtime (2014, directional).
$1K–$5K per hour
Typical range for small and mid-size businesses, where lost transactions and idle staff dominate the per-hour figure.
FAQ
Cost per hour of downtime, answered.
Common questions when turning an outage into an hourly dollar figure finance and SRE teams will both accept.
How do I calculate cost per hour of downtime?
Multiply the number of affected servers by the revenue impact per server hour. Add a hidden-tax multiplier for remediation labor, SLA credits, churn pressure, and compliance work to get the fully loaded hourly cost.
What is the average cost of one hour of downtime?
For large enterprises the median is above $300,000 per hour, and 98% report more than $100,000 per hour (ITIC 2024). Small businesses typically land between $1,000 and $5,000 per hour.
How do I convert cost per hour to per minute?
Divide the hourly rate by 60, or use the cost per minute calculator directly. Per-minute framing is most useful when arguing for faster detection and lower MTTR, since each minute of delay carries the same marginal cost.
Should I include hidden costs in the hourly rate?
Yes. Direct lost revenue is only the first line item. Recovery labor, SLA credits, reputational damage, and post-incident review all extend past the outage window and belong in a defensible per-hour figure.
What about a full day, or IT and website downtime specifically?
See cost per day, cost of IT downtime, cost of website downtime, or the full annual model.
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