What an idle hour actually costs you.

Fill in six figures you already know. This converts unplanned downtime on a single line into the dollar figure your finance team will recognize, per hour and per year.

True cost, one hour of unplanned downtime

At 0 idle hours a year

At your current downtime rate, per year $0

Lost margin, product you did not ship$0
Labor paid to stand idle$0

Fill in the fields below and the figure will appear here.

01 What the line produces

Line or product familyOptional. Anything that tells you which line this sheet is about

Good units per hour when runningNormal throughput, not nameplate max

/hr

Contribution margin per unitPrice minus material and variable cost, not full standard cost

$each

02 What keeps running while the line is down

Crew on this linePeople still on the clock, still paid

ppl

Fully loaded labor rateWages plus benefits and taxes, per person per hour

$/hr

03 How often it happens

Unplanned downtime per weekBreakdowns, changeovers gone long, waiting on parts

hrs

Operating weeks per yearDefault 50

wks

Enter your numbers above and this becomes the sentence you walk into the CFO's office with.

This sheet prices one line, not the whole plant. Throughput and margin vary enormously between lines, so blending them produces a number that describes neither. Run it again for another line and keep both sheets. Working out what the whole operation is losing is what the audit is for.

How this is calculated, and what it leaves out

What it counts. This is a contribution margin model. It counts the margin on product you did not make, plus the labor you paid for anyway while the line was stopped.

Why the labor counts even though you pay it regardless. The crew is on the clock either way, so this is not extra cash out the door. It is payroll spent standing still rather than producing, and treating it as free is how downtime stays invisible for years.

What it deliberately leaves out. Overhead you would pay anyway, expediting, overtime recovery, and any missed delivery penalties. Every one of those is real and none of them are in this number.

Overlap warning. If your downtime log counts changeovers that ran long, the changeover calculator prices those same hours from a different angle, and the capacity calculator counts them again as unused capacity. Do not add the results of the three together.

So the figure is a floor rather than a ceiling. It is built to survive an argument with a controller, not to be impressive.