Updates and Notes
04/01/23 Updated to include research on actual time lost.
20/12/24 Note NI changes from April ’25. Threshold drop from £9,100 to £5,000 and % change from 13.8% to 15%. Don’t forget the Employment Allowance for small businesses that means employers don’t pay the first £5,000 in the tax year going up to £10,500 from April ’25. See here for details on the changes and here for more info.
23/10/25 Updated post to properly reflect new NI in calculations and changed figures to reflect newer research that now suggests employees may lose an hour or more a day to inefficient systems, distractions and legacy tech (2021 research figures cited an average of 46 minutes). Improved formatting and layout.
How Much Does an Employee Cost?
Have you ever wondered how much an employee costs your business?
This post gives an accurate overall cost inc. National Insurance, employer pension contributions and other office/admin overheads and benefits.
N.B. see the note above re small business employment allowance.
How Much Time (= Money!) is Wasted?
Research now suggests employees may lose an hour or more a day to inefficient systems, distractions, and legacy tech.
Use this calculator, and tweak the figures to get an idea of how much money is being wasted on poor IT. Maybe even carry out research and put in figures more specific / accurate to your business. I think it will shock you.
£35,000 salary…
Each hour lost = £6,000 wasted PA
10 employees = £60,000 !!!
Think about those old PCs that take a few extra minutes to boot up or restart.
What about inadequately resourced machines taking a few seconds longer to load a document or spreadsheet?
Are there any other things in your business that take up unnecessary time? Any repeating processes that can be automated?
They very quickly add up to a significant amount of time.
As an example, the cost of a new PC would be offset in the first few months, let alone the 3-5 year lifespan of a decent machine.
It really makes no sense allowing any of your staff to lose even 10 minutes a day to inadequate systems or processes.
Try to think of other aspects of your business where your staff are not as efficient as they could or should be. Written SOPs (standard operating procedures) and other things that save a few minutes or seconds here or there are so incredibly important. Here are some of the unseen £££ going missing.
Also bear in mind the fact that the income generators in your business are almost certainly backed up with back-end staff e.g. Accounts and HR so their overheads may be more than you think. The £5k default in here may be too low. Add benefits e.g. healthcare to the salary as NICs will be due on them.
Note: most employees are only 70-80% efficient. The wasted costs figures are actually worse; losing 10 minutes out of the productive part of the day is worse than losing 10 minutes out of a 100% day. The maths below doesn’t factor this in.
Play with the figures on our bespoke employee cost calculator – it is a bit of an eye opener!
Also – feel free to check out our Downtime Cost Calculator which deals with downtime rather than lost productivity.
