Cost of Downtime: The Median US Public Company Has $96K an Hour at Stake

The cost of downtime starts with the revenue a company books every hour. We pulled fiscal 2025 revenue for 3,560 US-based SEC filers from the SEC’s XBRL data and divided by 8,760 hours. The median of the 3,001 companies listed on a US exchange takes in $96K an hour, or $1,607 a minute. That is revenue at stake, an upper bound on lost sales, not the full cost.

Which industries have the most revenue at stake per hour?

Grouping the listed companies by their SEC industry code, insurance and health plans have the highest median, at $439K an hour across 94 companies, led by UnitedHealth Group, Berkshire Hathaway, and Cigna Group. Airlines and air freight are effectively tied at $425K, and construction and homebuilding ($338K) come third. Pharma and biotech sit at the bottom of the 19 groups, with a median of $7,091: 47% of listed pharma and biotech companies booked less than $50 million in revenue for the year. Software and IT services, the group closest to the MSP market, has a median of $68K an hour, below the all-company median of $96K.

Median fiscal 2025 revenue divided by 8,760 hours, US-listed companies grouped by SIC code; groups with at least 15 companies. Hover a bar for the 75th percentile and the largest company. Top three highlighted.

What is the cost of downtime for the median company?

The spread is enormous, so averages mislead. The mean listed company books $866K an hour, but that figure is pulled up by giants: the 100 largest companies account for 58% of all revenue in the group. The median is $96K an hour, which corresponds to annual revenue of about $844.6M. A quarter of listed companies take in less than $12K an hour; one in ten takes in more than $1.6M.

Count of US-listed companies by fiscal 2025 revenue per hour. Of the 263 listed companies under $1K an hour, 83 are in pharma and biotech, the largest group.

For the small and midsize businesses that MSPs serve, the numbers are much smaller. A company with $10 million in annual revenue books about $1,142 an hour across the whole year, or about $4,444 per business hour if all its sales happen in a 9-hour day, 250 days a year.

Calculate your downtime cost

What real outages cost, according to the filings

Companies rarely put a number on an outage, but when the hit is large enough they disclose it to investors. These are the figures in the filings themselves. To compare them with revenue at stake, the fourth column divides each dollar amount by the company’s revenue per hour in the year of the incident.

Hours of revenue = the first dollar figure in column two divided by revenue per hour (AutoNation uses its roughly $43 million one-time staff pay; Asbury disclosed only an earnings per share range). UnitedHealth’s lost revenue was at its Optum Insight unit, so dividing by group revenue understates the hit to that unit. These are different kinds of figures (revenue, pre-tax income, EBITDAR, expenses) and are not comparable with each other.

Delta: what revenue at stake gets right and wrong

Delta booked $61.6B of revenue in 2024, or $7.04M an hour. Five days of that is $844.4M. Delta’s August 8, 2024 Form 8-K put the direct revenue impact of the July 19 CrowdStrike outage at “$380 million, primarily driven by refunding customers for cancelled flights and providing customer compensation in the form of cash and SkyMiles”, or about 54 hours of average revenue. So the revenue Delta lost was about 45% of five days of revenue at stake. But Delta also reported “$170 million” of non-fuel expense, “primarily due to customer expense reimbursements and crew-related costs”, and its 2024 10-K says the disruption caused “approximately 7,000 cancellations of Delta flights over five days, impacting 1.4 million customers.” Revenue at stake overstated the lost sales and missed the recovery bill.

The CDK dealer outage: a vendor goes down, every customer pays

In June 2024 a cyber incident at CDK Global took down the dealer management system that many car dealers use for sales, service, and accounting. Four public dealer groups quantified it. Sonic Automotive estimated the hit to pre-tax income at about $30.0 million, “which includes approximately $11.6 million in additional compensation expenses.” AutoNation said the outage “reduced earnings per share by an estimated $1.55, including $0.79 of one-time costs”, and its 10-Q cites about $43 million paid to commission-based staff “to ensure business continuity.” Asbury put the hit at $0.95 to $1.15 per share and noted cyber insurance of $15.0 million with a $2.5 million deductible. Group 1 reported $5.9 million of one-time retention pay. Three of the four groups broke out pay to staff during the outage as a separate cost.

CrowdStrike and the vendor side

CrowdStrike’s 10-K for the fiscal year ended January 31, 2025 records $60.1M of expenses “net of insurance receivable recorded” relating to the July 19 incident, and says its customer commitment packages “that extend subscription periods will lengthen the applicable term over which we recognize revenue.” The vendor’s own direct expense was small next to what a single customer such as Delta reported. The two cyberattacks in the table, at UnitedHealth and MGM, produced the same mix of lost revenue or earnings plus response costs, and our tracker of every SEC Item 1.05 cybersecurity incident filing shows how often companies now disclose material incidents.

Why the popular per-minute figures do not hold up

Pages that rank for this search tend to lead with one per-minute number, often attributed to a 2014 Gartner blog post or to vendor surveys of IT leaders. The original Gartner blog URL now redirects to a general Gartner landing page, so we could not read the source and do not use the number. A single average cannot describe businesses whose hourly revenue ranges from under $1,000 to $81.8M. The SEC data lets any company find peers its own size.

What this means for MSPs

Use revenue at stake to size the conversation, not to close it. For a client, multiply annual revenue by the share that depends on the systems in question, divide by operating hours, and you have a defensible ceiling for lost sales per hour. Then add the costs the filings above show are real: staff paid to wait or work around the outage (AutoNation, Sonic, Group 1), customer refunds and reimbursements (Delta), and outside recovery help, which you can price with the hourly rates in federal IT contracts. Compare that total with what redundancy, tested backups, and a vendor outage plan cost per year.

Two lessons stand out. First, third-party platforms are a single point of failure: the CDK and CrowdStrike cases hit companies whose own systems were not the root cause, so business continuity plans need a section on what happens when a key SaaS or security vendor goes down. Second, plan for physical events too: FEMA data on major disaster declarations by state shows how often disasters strike each state, and continuity plans should cover sites as well as software.

Frequently asked questions

What is the average cost of downtime?

It depends almost entirely on company size. Across 3,001 US-listed companies in fiscal 2025, the median brings in $96K of revenue per hour ($1,607 per minute). The middle half sits between $12K and $428K per hour. That is revenue at stake during a full outage, an upper bound on lost sales, not the total cost.

How do you calculate the cost of downtime?

Start with revenue at stake: annual revenue times the share of revenue that depends on the affected systems, divided by 8,760 hours, times the hours down. Then subtract what customers will simply buy later and add recovery labor, overtime, refunds, penalties, and lost productivity. Delta’s filings show both sides: $380 million of direct revenue impact plus $170 million of extra expense.

What is the average cost of downtime per industry?

Measured as median revenue per hour for US-listed companies, insurance and health plans lead at $439K per hour, followed by airlines and air freight ($425K) and construction and homebuilding ($338K). Pharma and biotech has the lowest median of the 19 groups we measured, at $7,091.

What does cost of downtime mean?

It is the money a business loses while systems or operations are unavailable: lost or delayed revenue, idle staff, recovery and overtime costs, refunds and contractual penalties, and longer term damage such as lost customers. Public company filings usually report only the parts they can measure, such as lost revenue and one-time expenses.

How much did the CrowdStrike outage cost Delta?

Delta’s August 8, 2024 Form 8-K estimated a direct revenue impact of $380 million and $170 million of non-fuel expense from the July 19, 2024 outage, partly offset by $50 million of lower fuel expense. It said its legal claims against CrowdStrike and Microsoft total at least $500 million. About 7,000 flights were cancelled over five days.

Look up a company: the 100 largest US-listed companies

Click a column to sort. The downloadable CSV has all 3,769 US filers in the data, including subsidiaries, companies not listed on an exchange, and the excluded partial-revenue filers, each flagged.

Methodology

References

1. SEC, EDGAR application programming interfaces (XBRL frames and submissions). Accessed October 2026.
2. SEC XBRL frames, us-gaap Revenues, USD, CY2025. Accessed October 2026.
3. SEC XBRL frames, us-gaap RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax, USD, CY2025. Accessed October 2026.
4. Delta Air Lines, Form 8-K, August 8, 2024. Accessed October 2026.
5. Delta Air Lines, Form 10-K for 2024. Accessed October 2026.
6. CrowdStrike Holdings, Form 10-K for fiscal 2025. Accessed October 2026.
7. AutoNation, Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1, July 31, 2024. Accessed October 2026.
8. AutoNation, Form 10-Q, quarter ended June 30, 2024. Accessed October 2026.
9. Sonic Automotive, Form 10-Q, quarter ended June 30, 2024. Accessed October 2026.
10. Asbury Automotive Group, Form 8-K Exhibit 99.1, August 2, 2024. Accessed October 2026.
11. Asbury Automotive Group, Form 10-Q, quarter ended June 30, 2024. Accessed October 2026.
12. Group 1 Automotive, Form 10-Q, quarter ended June 30, 2024. Accessed October 2026.
13. UnitedHealth Group, Form 10-Q, quarter ended March 31, 2024. Accessed October 2026.
14. MGM Resorts International, Form 8-K, October 5, 2023. Accessed October 2026.