The cost of IT downtime: the numbers for a 20-workstation company and how managed services reduce them

• Around €14 per person per hour In pay and employer social security alone, using Statistics Portugal’s (INE) average salary for 2025.
• Around €1,000 per hour In a 20-workstation company, adding salaries, lost revenue and recovery.
• Around €3,560 For a failure at 9:00 am resolved by lunchtime, four hours later.
• More than €7,000 a year If that lost morning happens twice.

And these figures still leave out what is hardest to measure: the client who gave up, the missed deadline and the team sitting idle in front of the screen.

Downtime hits in three ways, which together give the real cost:

1. Salaries without output — people are still paid but cannot work: number of people idle × hourly cost of each.
2. Revenue that does not come in — sales, bookings or appointments that do not happen; some is recovered later, some is lost.
3. Recovery time — when systems come back, there are emails piling up, work to redo and clients to call back.

An important clarification: an employee’s hourly cost is not the salary divided by the hours. It is everything the company pays in a year — salary, statutory bonuses and employer social security — divided by the hours actually worked.

According to INE, average total gross monthly pay per employee in Portugal was €1,694 in 2025, already including bonuses and other irregular components spread across the year. Over 12 months, that is around €20,330 gross.

Adding the employer’s social security contribution (TSU) of 23.75% in most cases, the annual cost reaches around €25,160. With 220 effective working days (excluding weekends, 22 working days of holiday and public holidays) at 8 hours a day, that is 1,760 hours.

Result: €25,160 ÷ 1,760 h = around €14.30 per hour per person. That is the minimum. In offices, clinics and service companies, where salaries are usually above average, the figure rises.

Assumptions, in round numbers that are easy to replace:

• Revenue €100,000 per employee per year (use annual revenue ÷ number of people).
• Unrecoverable revenue 50% of what was not done in that hour.
• Recovery 30 minutes per person after systems come back.
• Total outage Nobody can work.

Illustrative example. Salary cost based on INE average pay (2025) and employer social security of 23.75%; revenue and recovery are assumptions to adjust.

The example is deliberately conservative. On a bad day, these costs can outweigh all the others:

• Lost data If the cause is a disk failure or an attack and the backup does not work, the outage goes from hours to days.
• Reputation A hotel without network at check-in or a clinic unable to take appointments is noticed by the client immediately.
• Penalties Missed contractual deadlines with your own clients.
• Overtime To catch up.
• Legal obligations Incidents involving personal data may require notification and, in some sectors, fall under the NIS2 directive.

Detect before it stops

Almost all outages give warning: a disk accumulating errors, a UPS at the end of its battery life, a line dropping packets, a certificate about to expire. With NOC and proactive monitoring, the alert reaches an engineer before it reaches users. The difference is explained in proactive monitoring or reactive support.

Shorten the outage with redundancy

A second internet connection that takes over automatically when the main one drops, backups actually restored in testing, and a written plan of who does what in the first hour. That is what separates 15 minutes from an entire day. See how we design business continuity and disaster recovery.

One accountable party with contracted response times

With response times defined in the contract, the question “who do I call?” is answered before the problem arises. In IT Unlimited managed services, support is remote, on-site and by telephone, with immediate response times. For those who cannot stop out of hours, the Premium 365 tier adds nights, weekends and public holidays, and is the only one with 24/7 support and monitoring.

Boost Portugal, a tourism activities company operating in Lisbon, Porto, the Douro and Madrid, has DataRoad as its IT partner under an IT Unlimited contract. It sells experiences to tourists on the spot: without internet, it stops selling.

The solution combines internet redundancy with automatic failover, remote monitoring with alerts and availability reports, backups and support for the IP phone system. Read the Boost Portugal case.

In 5 working days we identify the single points of failure — internet, server, power and backups — and work out with you the cost of each hour of downtime. No-obligation proposal. More than 10 workstations · support contract · remote, on-site and telephone support.

+351 211 459 950* · sales@dataroad.pt

*Call to a Portuguese landline.

• Government of Portugal — “Real wages grew 3.2% in 2025” (INE data: average total gross monthly pay of €1,694)
• INE — Highlights: average gross monthly pay per employee
• PwC Tax Guide 2026 — Social Security (employer rate: 23.75%)
• Portuguese Labour Code (Law No. 7/2009) — Article 238 (22 working days of holiday)