How much does an hour of downtime cost in a 20-station company?

8 min read · DataRoad

How much does an hour of downtime cost in a 20-person company? In the example we show below, with explicit assumptions, it costs about €1,000 per hour. An entire morning without a server, without internet or without email easily passes the €3,500 mark. And this figure still leaves out what is more difficult to measure: the customer who gave up, the deadline that failed, the team that stayed staring at the screen.

Most managers know that stopping a project costs money. Few know how much. Without this number, it is impossible to decide, with a clear head, how much to invest in prevention. That’s why we calculate the costs in a clear, step-by-step way so that you can repeat them with your company’s figures.

The account in three installments

An IT stop costs money in three ways. When added together, they give the actual cost of each hour.

1. Wage cost stopped. People continue to be paid, but they are not producing. The calculation is: number of people on leave × hourly cost per person.
2. Lost invoicing. Sales that don’t close, reservations that don’t go through, consultations that don’t get booked. Some recover later; others are lost forever.
3. Recovery. When systems come back online, no one gets back to 100% the next minute. There are accumulated emails, work to be done, customers who need to be called back.

How much does it cost for one person to stand still for an hour?

We started with official data. According to the INE, the average monthly gross remuneration per worker in Portugal was €1,694 in 2025. This figure already includes irregular components such as subsidies, distributed over the year. Multiplied by 12 months, it gives about €20,330 gross per year.

To this amount the company adds the TSU of the employing entity, which in most cases is 23.75%. The annual cost rises to about 25,160 €.

How many hours does this person work? We considered 220 effective working days per year — already discounting weekends, 22 working days of vacation and holidays — at 8 hours per day: 1,760 hours.

Example: 25,160 € ÷ 1,760 hours = about €14.30 per hour, per person. This is the minimum hourly rate for a stand-by period, only for remuneration. If your team wins above the national average — which is common in offices, clinics, and service companies — the number goes up.

Example table: 10, 20, 30 and 60 positions

For the other two installments, we need assumptions. We choose round numbers that are easy to replace:

• Invoicing: 100,000 € per worker per year (replace with the value of your company: annual turnover ÷ number of people).
• Invoicing that does not recover: 50%. Half of what was not done that time comes back later; the other half is lost.
• Recovery: 30 minutes per person after the systems are back up.
• Total stop: All the people are left unable to work.

Illustrative example. Salary cost calculated using the average remuneration from the INE (2025) and the TSU of 23.75%; turnover and recovery are assumptions that you must adjust to your reality.

Now the downtime has stretched to 9 hours — a server failure that only gets fixed at lunch — costing the company with 20 employees about 20 posts. 3.560 €. If it happens twice a year, that’s more than €7,000 lost without anyone having a bill for it.

What this account does not yet include

The example is deliberately conservative. Real costs that, on a bad day, can weigh more than all the others are left out:

• Data lost. If the outage comes from a disk failure or an attack, and the backup isn’t working, the problem no longer lasts for hours but for days.
• Customers and reputation. A hotel without a network at check-in or a clinic without access to appointments is seen by the customer at the moment.
• Time limits and penalties contracts with their own clients.
• Extra hours to recover the delay.
• Legal obligations. An incident involving personal data may require notification to the authorities, and in some sectors it is covered by the rules of the GDPR. NIS2.

How to reduce the cost of a stopover

There are two levers: making stops happen less often and making them last less time.

Less stops: seeing the problem before it stops the company

Most outages give signs beforehand: a disk accumulating errors, a UPS with the battery running out, an internet line losing packets, a certificate about to expire. With proactive monitoring, These alerts reach a technician before they reach their users. We explain the difference in detail in the article about Proactive monitoring vs. reactive support.

Shorter stops: redundancy and a tested plan

A second internet connection that comes up on its own when the main one goes down. Backups that were actually restored in a test, and not just “made.” A written plan that says who does what in the first hour. That’s what separates a 15-minute outage from a day-long outage. See how we structured it Business continuity and disaster recovery.

Someone responsible, with a deadline

When the company has a contract with defined response times, the question “to whom do I call?” already has an answer before the problem arises. IT Unlimited From DataRoad, support is remote, local and by phone, with immediate response times. For companies that cannot stop working outside of office hours, the escalable tier Premium 365 It adds coverage for nights, weekends, and holidays — it is the only tier with 24/7 support and monitoring.

A real case: Boost Portugal

Boost Portugal, a tourism animation company operating in Lisbon, Porto, Douro and Madrid, has DataRoad as its IT partner under the IT Unlimited contract. For a company that sells experiences to tourists in real time, being without internet means losing the ability to sell.

Therefore, the solution includes internet redundancy with fail-over — if one connection fails, the traffic automatically switches to the other — remote monitoring with alerts and availability reports, backups, and support for the IP phone system. Read more Full case of Boost Portugal.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I calculate the cost of an hour of downtime in my company?

Some three installments: the cost per hour of people on leave (annual cost of salary and TSU divided by the hours worked), the billing of that time that is not recovered and the recovery time after the systems are back up. With the average remuneration from the INE, the salary cost is around €14 per person per hour.

Is a partial stop counted as well?

Yes. If only the email or only the billing program is down, apply the account only to the affected people and to the billing that depends on this system. Often, this is where the hidden cost lies: small frequent failures that no one registers.

How much should I invest in prevention?

Compare the annual cost of likely outages with the cost of prevention. If your company loses two mornings a year, the example above shows that the lost value already justifies monitoring, redundancy, and tested backups.

Does DataRoad provide 24/7 support?

Support and 24/7 monitoring are part of the IT Unlimited Premium 365 tier. The Essential and Premium tiers cover business hours, with immediate response times.

Risk map of your company's downtime in 5 working days

We identify the single points of failure in your infrastructure — internet, server, power, backups — and calculate with you how much it would cost you for each hour of downtime. For companies with more than 10 locations · contract of assistance · remote, on-site and telephone support.

Sources

• Government of Portugal — “Real wages grew by 3.2% in 2025” (INE data: average monthly gross remuneration of €1,694)
• INE — Highlights: Average monthly gross remuneration per worker
• PwC Fiscal Guide 2026 — Social Security (employer’s contribution rate: 23.75%)
• Labour Code (Law No. 7/2009), Official Gazette — Art. 238 (22 working days of vacation)