For a 20-workstation company, an hour of downtime costs close to €1,000, and only a third is salary: the rest is revenue that evaporates and restart time.
More than 10 workstations · support contract · remote, on-site and phone support
For decision-makers short on time.
The question a CFO should ask before approving the IT budget is simple: what does an hour of downtime cost? In a 20-workstation company, our model gives close to €1,000, and only a third of that is salary; the rest is revenue that evaporates. Four hours without a server on a Tuesday morning takes more than €3,500. Below is the full calculation, with official sources, ready to apply to your own figures.
| Indicator | Reference value |
|---|---|
| Labour cost of one person unable to work | ≈ €14.30/hour (pay + employer social security) |
| One hour of total downtime, 20 workstations | ≈ €1,000 |
| A 9am fault resolved at 1pm | ≈ €3,560 |
| Two mornings like that in a year | > €7,000 |
Left out of these figures are the client who went to a competitor, the late delivery and the morale of a team that spent the morning waiting.
Three components, which add up:
Beware a common mistake: an employee's hourly cost is not obtained by dividing salary by the hours in a month. Add up everything the company pays out in a year (salary, allowances, employer contribution) and divide by the hours actually worked.
The starting point is INE, Portugal's statistics institute: in 2025, average total gross pay was €1,694 a month, with allowances and bonuses already spread across twelve months. Full year: around €20,330.
Add the employer's social security contribution (TSU), 23.75% in most cases, and the annual cost comes to around €25,160. On the hours side: 220 days of actual work (after weekends, public holidays and 22 working days of annual leave) times 8 hours, i.e. 1,760 hours.
Final sum: €25,160 divided by 1,760 hours gives approximately €14.30 per person per hour. It is a floor, not a ceiling: in clinics, offices and professional services, where pay is above average, the figure is higher.
Assumptions used (swap them for yours):
| Component | 10 workstations | 20 workstations | 30 workstations | 60 workstations |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Salaries (1 h) | €143 | €286 | €429 | €858 |
| Lost revenue (1 h) | €284 | €568 | €852 | €1,705 |
| Restart (30 min) | €71 | €143 | €214 | €429 |
| Total per hour | ≈ €500 | ≈ €1,000 | ≈ €1,500 | ≈ €3,000 |
Illustrative figures: salaries based on the INE 2025 average with a 23.75% employer contribution; revenue and restart are adjustable assumptions.
The model is deliberately conservative. Some factors, on a bad day, outweigh everything else:
Two levers: fewer incidents and shorter incidents. A premium MSP works on both.
Disks with failing sectors, worn UPS batteries, packet loss on the line, certificates about to expire: all of these give warning in advance. A NOC with proactive monitoring receives the warning and acts before the user feels it. The comparison is set out in prevent or react: what pays off.
A secondary internet line with automatic failover. Backups whose restore has been proven. A written script for the first hour. This is what drastically shortens the incident, see our disaster recovery and continuity model.
When there is a contract with response times, nobody wastes time looking for someone to call. DataRoad's IT Unlimited guarantees remote, on-site and telephone support, with immediate response. Operations that do not stop at night choose Premium 365: it adds nights, weekends and public holidays and is the only tier with 24/7 support and monitoring.
Boost Portugal (tourism activities in Lisbon, Porto, the Douro and Madrid) has an IT Unlimited contract with DataRoad. The business sells to tourists in real time; without the network, the till closes.
The architecture combines two internet links with automatic failover, remote monitoring with alerts and availability reports, backups and IP PBX support. Details in the Boost Portugal case study.
The cost of an hour of downtime is the hourly cost of the people affected + the unrecoverable revenue for that hour + restart time. Using the INE national average, the salary portion is around €14 per person per hour.
Yes, applied only to those who are blocked and to the revenue that depends on that system. Small, repeated failures that are never logged are often the biggest hidden cost.
At least the equivalent of the annual cost of likely outages. If you lose two mornings a year, monitoring, redundancy and tested backups already pay for themselves.
Only on Premium 365, which includes 24/7 support and monitoring. Essential and Premium run during business hours, with immediate response times.
We identify single points of failure (internet, server, power, backups) and calculate with you the value of each hour of downtime in your company. Request a no-commitment proposal.
More than 10 workstations · support contract · remote, on-site and telephone support. Call +351 211 459 950 * or write to sales@dataroad.pt.
*Call to a Portuguese landline.
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