Managed IT Support
The cost of unresolved IT issues: a UK downtime model per employee, per hour
Why small IT problems become expensive: a UK downtime cost model per employee per hour, where cost hides in productivity, security and emergencies, and the fix.
By Dig IT SolutionsUpdated 8 September 20265 min read
Short answer
Unresolved IT issues cost more over time because the bill lands on payroll, not the IT invoice. A workable UK model is staff affected, multiplied by hours lost, multiplied by fully loaded hourly cost, plus lost revenue and recovery spend. On that basis a 20-person office losing 15 minutes each per day loses around 1,200 staff hours a year.
The reason IT problems get tolerated is that their cost is invisible. Nobody invoices you for the fifteen minutes a day each person spends waiting for a slow machine, or the afternoon the office lost when the server rebooted itself. This article gives you a simple model to make that cost visible, shows where it hides, and explains why fixing things early is so much cheaper than fixing them late.
A downtime cost model for a UK business
You do not need a consultant for this. Three numbers and a multiplication.
Fully loaded hourly cost per employee. Salary plus employer National Insurance, pension and overheads, divided by working hours. For a member of staff on £30,000 with on-costs, a rough figure is £18 to £20 an hour. For a director it is several times that. Use your own payroll.
Staff hours lost. Number of people affected multiplied by hours they could not work.
Revenue and recovery. Revenue lost if you bill by the hour or sell online, plus emergency call-outs, replacement hardware bought at short notice, and any data recovery.
Cost of an incident = (staff affected × hours lost × hourly cost) + lost revenue + recovery spend.
Run it twice: once for a full outage, once for the daily drag. The figures below are illustrative and use round numbers so you can substitute your own.
The full outage
A 20-person office. The server fails at 10am on a Tuesday. Nobody can reach files or the line-of-business application until 4pm. A break-fix engineer attends at £90 an hour for six hours, and a replacement disk is bought at short notice.
| Line | Working | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Staff hours lost | 20 people × 6 hours × £20 | £2,400 |
| Engineer | 6 hours × £90 | £540 |
| Emergency hardware | Premium over planned purchase | £300 |
| Lost billable work or sales | Business-specific, illustrative | £1,000 |
| **Total** | **£4,240 for one day** |
The daily drag
The same office. Nobody is down, but machines are slow, Wi-Fi drops after lunch, and Outlook asks for passwords. Each person loses 15 minutes a day.
| Line | Working | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Hours lost per day | 20 people × 0.25 hours | 5 hours |
| Hours lost per year | 5 hours × 240 working days | 1,200 hours |
| Cost per year | 1,200 hours × £20 | **£24,000** |
That second number surprises most owners. It is more than the outage, it is more than a year of managed support for the whole office, and it never appears anywhere because it is spread across everyone in small pieces. On our indicative per-device rates, support for that office with a server and a firewall is about £545 a month, or £6,540 a year.
Why small problems rarely stay small
Most IT faults announce themselves early and quietly.
- A computer that has become slow may have a disk that is failing, a drive that is full, or malware.
- A connection that drops occasionally may be a switch on its way out, an overloaded access point, or interference.
- A backup that reports a warning once is a backup that will fail silently later.
- A server that runs hot is a server with a fan or a dust problem that will become a failure.
Left alone, each worsens. The disk fails on the busiest day. The switch takes the phones with it. The backup is discovered to have been failing for months on the day it is needed. What would have been a warranty swap or a ten-minute configuration change becomes the outage in the table above. Monitoring exists to catch the quiet phase, which is why it is the core of managed IT support.
Where the cost hides
Productivity. The daily drag, above. The largest and least visible cost.
Workarounds and technical debt. Staff route around problems: personal laptops, files emailed to themselves, shared passwords, updates dismissed. Each workaround is a security gap and a future support ticket. Over time the environment becomes one nobody dares change, and the eventual fix costs more than doing it properly would have.
Security. Unpatched systems, disabled protections and untested backups are the environment in which a phishing email becomes a compromised mailbox or a ransomware event. The GOV.UK Cyber Security Breaches Survey consistently finds phishing the most common attack on UK businesses. The cost of a serious incident, including recovery, lost work, customer notification and possible reporting to the ICO, is the tail risk that the model cannot easily price and that dwarfs everything else.
Emergency spend. Engineers at short notice, out-of-hours rates, hardware bought the day it fails at whatever price is available, data recovery services.
Customers. Slow responses, failed transactions, missed emails. Retaining a customer is cheaper than replacing one, and IT failures are a common reason to look elsewhere.
Staff. People who fight their tools every day are less productive and more likely to leave. Recruitment is expensive.
Compliance. Outdated systems and unreliable backups make UK GDPR obligations hard to meet and impossible to evidence.
The pattern: quiet, then expensive
The cost of unresolved IT is not a steady drain. It is a long period of small friction followed by rare, expensive events. That shape is why it is under-budgeted: the friction is tolerated because it is small, and the events are not planned for because they are rare.
A managed contract flattens the shape. The friction is reduced by monitoring, patching and a helpdesk. The events are made rarer by catching faults early and are made cheaper by tested backups and a recovery plan. The fee is the same every month, which is the point.
What to do about it
- Run the model for your own business, using your payroll and your last outage. Both numbers.
- List the tolerated problems. Ask staff. Slow machines, Wi-Fi, printers, passwords. Each is a cost and a symptom.
- Fix the security and backup gaps first. MFA, managed endpoint protection, patching on a schedule, a restore-tested backup. These remove the tail risk.
- Put monitoring in place so the next failing disk is a warranty swap, not an outage.
- Plan replacements for anything out of warranty, so hardware is bought on your schedule.
- Compare the model's numbers with the cost of a managed contract. The IT support cost calculator gives an indicative figure, and break-fix versus managed IT support works through a side-by-side year.
What to do next
If the daily drag number for your business came out higher than you expected, the IT support cost calculator will show what it costs to remove most of it, using our indicative per-device rates. Put the two figures side by side. For most businesses of up to 250 people the comparison is not close.