Home / Resources / Downtime Cost Per Hour
Cost Analysis
What an hour of downtime actually costs
The part is almost never the expense. The stoppage is. This is the arithmetic that turns a vague sense of urgency into a number you can put in front of a controller, built from published figures and your own inputs rather than anybody's guess.
Accrued since you opened this page
$0.00
Running at the rate set in the calculator below. Change the inputs and this changes with them. Nothing here is our number. It is yours.
- Four layers, not one. Idle labor, idle asset, lost output and the cascade that follows. Most people count the first and stop.
- Wages understate labor by about 43 percent. BLS puts benefits at 30.1 percent of employer cost, so a wage needs a multiplier before it is honest.
- Published plant figures do not transfer. An automotive line and a landscaping crew are not the same problem and should not borrow each other's numbers.
- Trucking has a real per-hour figure. ATRI benchmarks it directly from carrier data, which makes fleet math far easier than field equipment math.
- The repair path is the variable you control. Everything else is fixed once the hose lets go.
- Kit the parts that stop the whole job. Criticality, not price, decides what belongs on the shelf.
The premiseWhy the invoice is the wrong number
A hydraulic hose lets go on an excavator at nine in the morning. The assembly costs forty dollars to replace. By the time the machine is moving again it is half past one.
Ask most operations what that cost and you get the forty dollars. Occasionally you get the forty dollars plus a shrug about lost time. Almost nobody produces a figure, which is a problem, because the figure is the only thing that justifies changing anything. Without it, spare parts look like an expense rather than insurance, and the cheapest hose on the shelf looks like the smart buy.
The awkward part is that there is no published number for your machine. There are published numbers for large manufacturing plants and there are published numbers for trucking, and both are useful, but neither one is an excavator in Nassau County with a three-person crew standing around it. What exists instead is a method, and the method is not complicated. It is four numbers multiplied by hours.
The anatomyThe four layers of a stoppage
Downtime cost is a stack, and each layer behaves differently. Separating them matters because you can influence some and not others.
Idle labor
Everyone who cannot work while the machine is down, priced at what they cost the business rather than what appears on their check. This is the layer people most often get wrong, and it is usually the easiest to measure.
Idle asset
The machine keeps costing money while it sits. Finance or lease payment, insurance, registration, depreciation. If it is rented, the clock is explicit and unarguable. If it is owned, the clock is still running, it is just quieter.
Lost output
Whatever the operation was producing or earning during those hours. Loads not delivered, units not made, service calls not run, billable hours not billed. Zero for some jobs and the largest number on the page for others.
The cascade
What the stoppage causes downstream. Overtime to recover the schedule, expedited freight, a missed delivery window, a crew held over, a rescheduled inspection. Hardest to quantify and frequently larger than the first three combined.
Getting layer one right
An hourly wage is not what an employee costs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks this directly, and in March 2026 employer costs for private industry workers averaged $46.60 per hour worked, of which wages and salaries were $32.60 and benefits were $14.01. That puts benefits at 30.1 percent of total employer cost, which means wages account for 69.9 percent.
Invert it and you get a multiplier. Divide a wage by 0.699, or multiply by roughly 1.43, and you have the burdened figure. A crew paid $30 an hour costs closer to $43 an hour to have standing still. Over four hours with three people on the ground, that difference alone is $156 that a naive calculation misses.
This is a national private-industry average and your own burden rate may sit above or below it, particularly on prevailing wage or union work where the benefit share runs higher. If your controller can give you the real number, use theirs. If not, 1.43 is a defensible starting point with a federal source behind it.
Count everyone the stoppage stops, not just the operator. If a laborer, a foreman and a truck driver are all waiting on the same machine, that is four people idle, not one. The most common undercount in this whole exercise is treating downtime as a single-person problem when the machine is the reason four people came to work that morning.
The methodThe formula, written out
Every serious version of this calculation reduces to the same shape. Four rates, one duration.
( people × wage × 1.43 )
+ equipment cost per hour
+ lost output per hour
= cost per hour
then × hours down = cost of the event
then + cascade costs, added separately
The cascade sits outside the multiplication deliberately. It does not scale cleanly with hours. A stoppage that ends at two in the afternoon and a stoppage that ends at four can differ by one hour of direct cost and by an entire missed delivery window, so it needs judging case by case rather than folding into a rate.
Where each input comes from
- People and wage. Your payroll. If you need a sanity check, the BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program publishes median hourly wages for roughly 830 occupations nationally and by metro area.
- Equipment cost per hour. For rented equipment, the rental rate divided by the hours it is available to you. For owned equipment, annual ownership cost divided by annual operating hours. Most fleet software already tracks this.
- Lost output per hour. Revenue attributable to the machine, or units multiplied by contribution margin. For a support machine that produces nothing directly, this can honestly be zero.
- Hours down. Not repair time. Wheels-stopped to wheels-turning, including diagnosis, sourcing the part, travel and the paperwork afterwards.
The evidenceWhat the published research actually says
Four bodies of work are worth knowing about, because they are the figures that get quoted and it is useful to know what each one does and does not cover.
| Source | Figure | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| Siemens True Cost of Downtime, 2024 | Up to $2.3M / hr | An idle production line at a large automotive plant. The same report puts fast-moving consumer goods around $36,000 per hour. |
| Siemens True Cost of Downtime, 2024 | $1.4 trillion / yr | Combined annual loss to unplanned downtime across the world's 500 largest companies, or 11 percent of total revenues, up from 8 percent in 2019 and 2020. |
| ABB Value of Reliability, 2023 | $125,000 / hr | Median across industrial sectors, from a survey of 3,215 plant maintenance decision makers. Over two thirds reported unplanned outages at least monthly. |
| ATRI Operational Costs of Trucking, 2026 | $2.336 / mile | Industry-average cost to operate a truck in 2025, the highest in the report's history and 3.4 percent above the previous year. Excluding fuel, $1.854 per mile. |
| ATRI Operational Costs of Trucking, 2025 | $90.89 / hr | Average marginal cost per hour for 2024. A directly usable per-hour figure for the equipment layer on a Class 8 truck. |
| BLS Employer Costs, March 2026 | $46.60 / hr | Average total employer compensation cost per hour worked, private industry. Wages $32.60, benefits $14.01, giving the 1.43 burden multiplier. |
| BLS Occupational Wages, May 2025 | $24.51 / hr | Median hourly wage across all occupations, with a mean of $33.54. Construction and extraction occupations averaged $65,360 annually across 6.4 million workers. |
These numbers get lifted out of context constantly. The $2.3 million belongs to large automotive plants and nowhere else. The $125,000 is a median across industrial plants, not a figure for a two-truck landscaping outfit. Quoting either at a machine that does not resemble the study population is how a good argument gets dismissed in the first thirty seconds of a meeting.
What does transfer is the structure. Every one of those studies is measuring idle labor, idle asset, lost output and cascade. The layers are the same at every scale. Only the magnitudes move.
The toolPut your own numbers in
The calculator below is the article's actual argument. Pick a starting profile, then overwrite every figure with yours. The presets exist so the fields are not blank, and they are not research findings.
What is worth doing once, properly, is running it against a stoppage that actually happened to you. Pull the real hours from the job record rather than the hours you remember, because the remembered figure is almost always shorter.
The Ledger
What is this stoppage costing you
Everything updates as you type. The bars at the bottom compare the price of the part against the cost of not having it, which is usually the moment the argument settles itself.
Your input Every field below is yours to set. Nothing here is a published figure.
Sourced The 1.43 labor burden multiplier, from BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026.
Presets are editable starting points, not published figures. Only the 1.43 burden multiplier is sourced, from the BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release for March 2026. Everything else on this panel is yours. Cascade costs are excluded because they do not scale with hours.
By classFleet and field equipment
Manufacturing gets the attention in this literature because plants are easier to study. Field and fleet equipment is where most hose failures actually happen, and the math there works differently in two ways worth understanding.
Trucks are the easy case
Trucking is the one sector with a genuinely usable published per-hour figure, because ATRI collects real cost data from carriers every year. The 2026 report puts the industry-average cost to operate a truck at $2.336 per mile for 2025, the highest in the report's history, with non-fuel costs at $1.854 per mile. The 2025 edition reported an average marginal cost of $90.89 per hour for 2024.
That hourly figure is close to a drop-in value for the equipment layer, because it already blends payment, insurance, maintenance, tires and depreciation. Add burdened driver labor on top and you are most of the way to a defensible number in about a minute.
One detail from the 2026 report is directly relevant to anyone reading a hose article: repair and maintenance was among the fastest-rising line items in 2025, up 8.6 percent, with tires up 6.4 percent. Fleet maintenance is getting more expensive faster than the rest of the cost base.
Field equipment is the hard case
An excavator has no revenue line of its own. It produces progress on a schedule, and progress is only convertible to money when you know what the schedule is worth. Three approaches work, in descending order of rigor.
- Contract value divided by scheduled hours. If the job is worth $180,000 over 400 machine hours, the machine is carrying $450 an hour of contract value. Crude, but honest and easy to defend.
- Critical path or not. If the machine is on the critical path, its downtime moves the completion date and everything downstream follows. If it is not, the cost is closer to labor and asset alone.
- Liquidated damages, where they exist. If the contract specifies a daily penalty for late completion, that figure is already agreed with the other side, which makes it the least arguable number available to you.
The same four hours cost different amounts in March and in July. A paving crew in a compressed Long Island season is not losing four hours, it is losing four hours from a fixed number of workable days, and those hours cannot be made up later in the year. Where the season is the constraint rather than the calendar, downtime is closer to permanently lost capacity than to delayed capacity, and it should be priced accordingly.
The variableThe repair path is what you control
Once a hose fails, most inputs are fixed. Crew size is what it is. The machine costs what it costs. The one thing genuinely in play is how many hours pass before it runs again, and that is decided by the repair path.
Total downtime breaks into five components. Only two of them are actual work.
Detection and diagnosis
Noticing the failure, getting to it, and establishing what actually failed. Usually short on a burst hose because the evidence is on the ground, and much longer on a slow weep that presents as a performance problem first.
Specification
Working out what the replacement needs to be. Bore, construction, both fittings, the orientation between them and the installed length. This is where a legible layline or the old assembly in hand saves genuine time, and where a guess costs a second trip.
Sourcing
The component that varies the most. On the shelf is minutes. Built at a counter is the drive plus the build. Ordered in is a business day at best, and considerably worse if the part turns out to be superseded, discontinued or wrong on arrival.
Installation
Fitting, torquing, bleeding and checking for leaks. Reasonably predictable and rarely the reason a machine is down all day.
Restart and verification
Bringing the system back up, running it under load and confirming the joint holds. On a hydraulic system this also means dealing with any contamination the failure introduced, which is its own quiet cost.
Run the calculator against your own figures for two paths, one where the part is in hand and one where it is ordered in, and the delta is the value of the sourcing decision. It is not a marketing claim, it is subtraction, and it is the argument for keeping a relationship with a counter that can build the assembly on the spot rather than a supplier who ships.
Specification is worth dwelling on, because it is the step most often underestimated. If you can identify the thread yourself the phone call is short. If you cannot, the fastest route is to bring the part. Our guide to identifying hose fittings covers the four checks that settle it, and the piece on crimping versus clamp-on explains why a field repair is not always the shortcut it looks like.
PreventionWhich spares are worth stocking
Once you have a cost per hour, the stocking decision stops being about the price of parts and starts being about probability. The logic is simple enough to do on paper.
If a given assembly fails roughly once a year, and having it on the shelf removes three hours from the stoppage, then the annual value of stocking it is three multiplied by your cost per hour. Compare that against the price of the spare and the answer is usually obvious and usually in favor of stocking.
The parts worth kitting are not the expensive ones. They are the ones whose absence stops everything, which are often the cheapest items in the system. A forty dollar hose that idles a four-person crew is a far better stocking candidate than a four hundred dollar component that can be worked around for a day.
A practical shortlist
- The assemblies that have already failed. Failure history is the best predictor you have, and most operations are sitting on it without using it. If a line has gone twice, it will go again.
- Anything on a machine with no backup. One machine of its type means no workaround exists, so every hour of its downtime is a full stop.
- Assemblies with unusual fittings. Common threads can be improvised at almost any counter. Legacy, metric and manufacturer-specific ends cannot, which is where a day disappears.
- Hoses in high-abrasion routing. If a line rubs, it will fail, and you already know which ones rub because you can see the wear.
- Anything with a lead time you cannot verify. A part nobody can promise by tomorrow belongs on your shelf rather than someone else's.
Stocking is not the whole answer, and inspection catches a good share of these before they become events. The failure modes and what they look like early are covered in warning signs fleet managers miss, and selection is covered in choosing the right hydraulic hose.
ImplementationWhat to start logging
The reason most operations cannot produce this number is not that the arithmetic is hard. It is that nobody records the inputs. Five fields on the existing work order fixes that inside a quarter.
- Time stopped and time running. Two timestamps. Not an estimate written up at the end of the week, which is where the underreporting comes from.
- Headcount affected. How many people could not work, which is nearly always more than one.
- What failed and where. Enough detail to spot a pattern. A hose that fails at the same bend on three machines is telling you about routing, not about hose.
- How the part was obtained. On the shelf, built at a counter, or ordered. This is the field that turns into a sourcing decision at the end of the year.
- Anything the stoppage caused. Overtime, expedited freight, a missed window, a rescheduled crew. One free-text line is enough.
After a quarter you can multiply real hours by a real rate and stop arguing from anecdote. After a year you can tell which machines and which assemblies are responsible for most of your lost hours, and that list is almost never the one people expect.
At the counterWhere we fit in this
Our part of the arithmetic is narrow and specific. We do not shorten diagnosis, installation or restart. We work on sourcing, which is the component with the widest spread between best and worst case.
- Assemblies built while you wait at both counters, from your sample or your specification. See custom hose fabrication.
- Thread and fitting identification with gauges, at no charge, which removes the guessing from step two. See hydraulic fittings and adapters.
- Crimped to matched components rather than mixed systems. See hydraulic hose crimping.
- Replacements for assemblies nobody catalogs anymore, built from the failed part. See OEM hose assembly replacement.
- Kitted spares built to your list, so the ones that stop everything are already on your shelf. See industrial hose assemblies.
- Fuel transfer, marine and pneumatic lines as well as hydraulic. See fleet fuel transfer, marine hoses and fittings and pneumatic quick disconnect fittings.
Two walk-in shops, six days a week, with the full range on the products page. If the machine cannot come to us, the failed assembly can, and that is usually enough.
Serving Long Island since 1964
Sixty years of building assemblies across the counter for Long Island contractors, fleets, marinas and shops, from Hempstead in Nassau County and Oakdale in Suffolk County, with regular work into Queens and across the metro area.
Proximity is not a nicety in this arithmetic, it is a line item. Every mile between a stopped machine and the counter that can fix it is time on the clock at whatever rate you calculated above, which is the entire reason two walk-in shops exist rather than one warehouse.
Common Questions
Downtime cost FAQ
Add three rates together. Burdened labor is the number of people idled multiplied by their hourly wage multiplied by about 1.43. Equipment cost per hour is the rental rate, or annual ownership cost divided by annual operating hours. Lost output is the revenue or margin the machine would have produced. Multiply the total by hours down, then add cascade costs like overtime and expedited freight separately, because those do not scale with hours.
Because a wage is not what an employee costs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in March 2026, private industry employer costs averaged $46.60 per hour worked, with wages at $32.60 and benefits at $14.01. That leaves wages at 69.9 percent of total cost, and dividing by 0.699 gives a multiplier of roughly 1.43. If your controller has your actual burden rate, use that instead.
Figures in that range circulate widely but they describe large manufacturing operations, not general equipment. The better-documented current sources are Siemens, which puts an idle line at a large automotive plant at up to $2.3 million per hour, and ABB, whose survey of 3,215 plant maintenance leaders found a median around $125,000 per hour across industrial sectors. None of those transfer to a single machine or a small fleet, and quoting them there tends to undermine the argument rather than strengthen it.
Trucking has better data than most sectors. ATRI reported an average marginal cost of $90.89 per hour for 2024, and its 2026 report put the industry-average cost to operate a truck at $2.336 per mile for 2025, the highest in the report's history. That hourly figure already blends payment, insurance, maintenance, tires and depreciation, so you add burdened driver labor and any lost revenue on top of it.
Divide the contract value by the scheduled machine hours to get the contract value the machine carries per hour. Then check whether it sits on the critical path, because a machine that moves the completion date costs far more than one that does not. If the contract specifies liquidated damages for late completion, that figure is already agreed with the other party and is the hardest to argue with.
The ones whose absence stops everything, which are usually inexpensive rather than expensive. Start with assemblies that have already failed, anything on a machine with no backup, assemblies with unusual or legacy fittings, hoses in routing you can see wearing, and anything with a lead time nobody will commit to. Multiply the hours a spare would save by your cost per hour and compare it against the price of the part.
Five fields on the work order. Time stopped and time running as real timestamps, headcount affected, what failed and where, how the part was obtained, and anything the stoppage caused downstream. A quarter of that data replaces estimates with evidence, and a year of it tells you which machines and which assemblies own most of your lost hours.
Only where failure is inconsequential. Once you have a cost per hour, the comparison is not between two prices, it is between a small price difference and the probability of an extra stoppage. On a machine idling several people, a hose that fails even slightly sooner erases the saving many times over. On something with a backup and no schedule pressure, the cheaper part can be the right call.
Ask The Counter
Send us the machines you run
We will tell you which assemblies are worth having on your shelf and which ones we can build fast enough that you do not need to. No obligation, and no sales pitch.
- Siemens, The True Cost of an Hour's Downtime. Automotive and FMCG hourly figures, and the $1.4 trillion annual total.
- ABB, Value of Reliability survey. Median industrial hourly cost from 3,215 plant maintenance leaders.
- ATRI, Analysis of the Operational Costs of Trucking. Per-mile and per-hour carrier cost benchmarks.
- BLS, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation. The wage and benefit split behind the 1.43 burden multiplier.
- BLS, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics. Median hourly wages by occupation, nationally and by metro area.
Sourcing Is The Variable
Bring the failed hose in
Two Long Island counters, six days a week. Most assemblies are measured, built, crimped and tested before you leave, which is the only part of this calculation we can actually shorten.