Downtime cost calculator · Canada · 2026
What does an hour of downtime cost you?
Three steps. Two minutes. We model the real cost of IT downtime: lost revenue plus idle payroll, your likely annual exposure, and how much a tested managed backup and DR plan claws back. No email until you see the number.
Tell us about your business
Two numbers and your industry set the run-rate downtime eats into.
Roughly. A band is fine. Drives the lost-revenue side of downtime.
Headcount that depends on IT to do their jobs. Drives idle-payroll cost.
What downtime really costs
For a typical 25-person Ontario business, an hour of IT downtime costs roughly $2,000 to $6,000 once lost revenue and idle payroll are combined, and a single multi-day outage can run into six figures. Most of that exposure is recoverable: a tested managed backup and disaster-recovery posture cuts modeled annual downtime from dozens of hours to a handful.
How the model works
Four inputs, a transparent formula, and every assumption sourced in the PDF. Directional by design, with a binding number that follows a scoping call.
Your hourly revenue run-rate × the share that stops, plus payroll paid while staff are blocked.
Untested backups and no DR plan push your expected annual downtime up; tested managed DR pushes it down.
We model exposure against a tested backup + DR + 24/7 monitoring posture floor of ~4 hours/year.
ITIC, Uptime Institute, StatsCan and Veeam benchmarks underpin every constant, listed in your PDF.
Common questions
How much does IT downtime cost a small business per hour?+
For most Canadian SMBs, an hour of IT downtime costs between roughly $1,500 and $15,000 once you add lost revenue to idle payroll, and far more for revenue-dependent firms like clinics, law firms and manufacturers. The exact figure depends on your revenue run-rate, how many people are blocked, and how much of the business stops when systems are down. This calculator models your specific number from those inputs.
How is the cost of downtime calculated?+
Downtime cost per hour = the share of your hourly revenue run-rate that stops + the payroll you keep paying while staff can't work. Annual exposure multiplies that hourly cost by the number of downtime hours you're likely to accumulate in a year, which is driven by whether your backups are restore-tested and whether you have a documented disaster-recovery plan.
What is a realistic recovery time (RTO) for an SMB?+
Without tested backups or a DR plan, many SMBs take several days to fully recover from a serious outage or ransomware event. With a tested managed backup + DR posture and 24/7 monitoring, that typically drops to hours, which is where most of the modeled annual exposure is clawed back.
Does cyber insurance cover downtime losses?+
Business-interruption coverage can offset some downtime losses, but most policies now require tested backups, MFA and an incident-response plan to pay out. Those are the same controls that reduce your downtime in the first place, so reducing exposure and improving insurability go hand in hand.
Turn the number into a plan
A 30-minute call turns your modeled exposure into a concrete backup and disaster-recovery posture, and a binding price. One business day to respond.
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