Ransomware & downtime cost calculator
Put a defensible number on what a ransomware attack or major outage would cost your organization — across lost revenue, lost productivity, data-loss rework, and recovery labour. Every figure is yours to edit, the formula is shown, and nothing leaves your browser.
For context, IBM's Cost of a Data Breach 2025 put the average ransomware breach at $5.08M, and Sophos reported a $1.53M mean recovery cost (excluding any ransom). Your figure depends entirely on the inputs above.
- Lost revenue (downtime)
- $273,973
- Lost productivity
- $480,000
- Data-loss rework (RPO)
- $480,000
- Recovery labour
- $12,000
Executive summary
A plain-language brief you can share with leadership — copy and paste into a slide, memo, or budget request.
Scenario: a ransomware attack or major outage affecting 500 employees, with a 24-hour recovery time (RTO) and 24 hours of data loss since the last recoverable backup (RPO). Estimated operational impact (excluding ransom, fines, and reputational damage): $1.25M - Lost revenue during downtime: $273,973 - Lost employee productivity: $480,000 - Data-loss rework (RPO): $480,000 - Recovery labour: $12,000 These figures are planning estimates based on the inputs above. Industry benchmarks (IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2025, Sophos State of Ransomware 2025) suggest ransomware incidents often cost far more once ransom, regulatory fines, and reputational damage are included.
How to calculate the cost of ransomware downtime
The cost of a ransomware attack or outage is more than the ransom. It breaks into four parts: revenue lost while customer-facing systems are down (driven by your recovery-time objective, or RTO), the productivity of staff who cannot work during the outage, the cost of recreating data produced after the last recoverable backup (your recovery-point objective, or RPO), and the labour to actually restore systems. Ransom, regulatory fines, and reputational damage sit on top and are deliberately excluded here.
This calculator makes all four dimensions explicit and shows the arithmetic, rather than hiding a single number behind a black box. The RPO dimension — the work lost between backups — is the one most calculators ignore, and it is exactly where better backup practice pays off: a tighter RPO shrinks the data you have to recreate, and a tighter RTO shrinks the downtime and productivity loss. All defaults are editable so you can model your own environment, and figures such as IBM's 2025 averages are provided as context, not baked into the math.
Example: a 500-employee firm with $100M annual revenue, a 24-hour RTO and 24-hour RPO, and a 5-person recovery team loses roughly $1.25M — about $274k in downtime revenue, $480k in lost productivity, $480k in data-loss rework, and $12k in recovery labour.
Sources: IBM Cost of a Data Breach 2025 ($5.08M average ransomware breach); Sophos State of Ransomware 2025 ($1.53M mean recovery); ITIC 2024 downtime survey · Last updated: 2026-07-06
Frequently asked questions
How much does an hour of downtime cost?
It varies widely by organization. This calculator derives your revenue lost per hour from your annual revenue, then adds the hourly productivity of affected staff. Industry surveys (for example ITIC) report that most mid-size and large firms lose over $300,000 per hour of downtime, but your own revenue and headcount give a far more accurate figure than any average.
What is the difference between RTO and RPO cost?
RTO (recovery-time objective) is how long recovery takes — it drives lost revenue, lost productivity, and recovery labour for the duration of the outage. RPO (recovery-point objective) is how much data you lose — the work created since the last backup that must be recreated. A backup strategy improves both: faster recovery lowers RTO cost, and more frequent recovery points lower RPO cost.
What is the average cost of a ransomware attack?
IBM's Cost of a Data Breach 2025 report put the average ransomware-related breach at $5.08M globally, while Sophos reported a mean recovery cost of $1.53M in 2025, excluding any ransom paid. These are averages across many organizations; the actual impact depends on your revenue, how long you are down, and how much data you lose — which is what this calculator estimates.
Does this calculator send my data anywhere?
No. It runs entirely in your browser and only encodes your inputs into the page URL so you can share or bookmark a result. Nothing is uploaded, stored, or logged, and no account is required.