Free Interactive Tool
Elevator Downtime
Cost Calculator
Put a defensible number on what breakdowns cost your elevators every year. Every figure below is an input you control, every default is a placeholder rather than a benchmark, and the formulas are printed further down the page so you can check the arithmetic yourself.
The Calculator
Your Numbers,
Your Result
Move a slider or type a value and the total updates immediately. Nothing is transmitted, nothing is stored, and there is no form standing between you and the answer.
Inputs
Units you are responsible for servicing. Default 100 is a placeholder.
Unplanned events that triggered an unscheduled visit. Take twelve months of emergency tickets and divide by units under contract. Default 3 is a placeholder.
Decide whether this includes waiting for parts and apply it consistently. Default 6 is a placeholder.
Fixed attendance charge per unplanned visit: dispatch, travel and any fixed subcontractor fee. Exclude the hourly labour counted below. Default 200 is a placeholder.
Fully loaded: pay, employer contributions, vehicle, tools and a share of supervision. Default 40 is a placeholder.
Optional. Set to zero if your contracts carry no financial penalty. Default 0.
Optional. The contractual penalty or service credit for one breach. Default 0.
Estimated annual downtime cost
Total estimated annual cost
USD 132,000
Across 100 lifts, 300 breakdowns and 1,800 hours of downtime per year.
Breakdown by component
45.5% of total
54.5% of total
0.0% of total
Cost per lift per year
USD 1,320
Cost per breakdown
USD 440
Total breakdowns per year
300
Total downtime hours per year
1,800
This is an estimate built from the values you entered. It deliberately excludes lost revenue, tenant compensation, reputational effects and management time, because those vary too widely to model honestly. Treat the figure as a floor rather than a ceiling.
Got a number you did not like? Bring it to a call with your controller types and we will show you which parts of it are addressable.
Talk to an Engineer →Show Your Working
How This Is
Calculated
Five lines of arithmetic. No weighting, no hidden coefficients, no assumed industry averages. If a number in the result looks wrong, one of these formulas will tell you which input caused it.
Total breakdowns per year
lifts x breakdowns per lift per year
With your inputs: 100 x 3 = 300
Callout cost
total breakdowns x cost per emergency callout
With your inputs: 300 x 200 = USD 60,000
Technician time cost
total breakdowns x hours down per breakdown x technician cost per hour
With your inputs: 300 x 6 x 40 = USD 72,000
SLA penalty cost
total breakdowns x breach share x penalty per breach
With your inputs: 300 x 0% x 0 = USD 0
Annual downtime cost
callout cost + technician time cost + SLA penalty cost
With your inputs: USD 60,000 + USD 72,000 + USD 0 = USD 132,000
Assumptions we are making
- Every breakdown produces exactly one emergency callout. If several breakdowns are handled in one visit, reduce the breakdowns figure rather than the callout charge.
- The callout charge and the technician hourly cost do not overlap. If your subcontractor bills a single all-inclusive fee, put it in the callout field and set the hourly cost to zero.
- Hours down are billable technician hours at the same rate throughout. Out-of-hours premiums are not modelled separately, so raise the hourly figure if a meaningful share of your callouts are at night or at weekends.
- The SLA breach share applies uniformly across every elevator. If penalties only apply to a subset of contracts, compute the breach share as a proportion of all breakdowns rather than of the contracts that carry penalties.
- All figures are annual and in one currency. No inflation, discounting or currency conversion is applied.
What the Number Means
Downtime Cost Is a
Measurement Problem
Three things drive the number the calculator produces. The sliders above set the size of each one.
- Emergency callouts: a fixed attendance charge for every unplanned visit
- Technician time: a loaded hourly cost across the hours each unit is down
- SLA penalties: contractual credits when a breakdown breaches a clause
Most elevator companies cannot produce this figure on demand, and that is the interesting part. The callout charges are in the billing system, the labour hours are in payroll or on paper job cards, the breakdown counts are in a ticket queue that may or may not capture calls that came in by phone, and the SLA position is reconstructed at month end from memory and email. The cost is real and continuous. The visibility is quarterly at best.
That is why the first honest use of this calculator is to expose how uncertain your own inputs are. If you cannot state breakdowns per lift with confidence, the number you get here is a guess with better presentation, and the fix is instrumentation rather than a better spreadsheet. When faults are logged automatically from the controller, every one of these inputs becomes a query instead of an estimate.
The second use is prioritisation. Run the calculator for your worst site or your worst controller family in isolation. Averages across all your elevators hide the fact that a small number of units usually generate a disproportionate share of the callouts, and the per-lift figure at the bottom of the results makes that visible immediately.
The third use is the business case. Once you have a defensible annual figure with the assumptions attached, the question becomes what proportion of it is avoidable. That is a separate calculation, and the ROI calculator handles it with the expected reduction left as a percentage you set rather than one we assert.
The figure above measures reactive downtime. The share of it that is avoidable is the gap between these two columns.
Frequently Asked Questions
Using the Calculator
Properly
They are round placeholder values chosen so the arithmetic is easy to follow on first load. They are not industry benchmarks and we do not present them as research. Replace every one of them with a figure from your own records before you take the output anywhere. A calculator built on generic averages tells you nothing about your elevators.
Keep Reading
Related Pages
Now Find Out How Much
of It Is Avoidable.
Bring your result, your controller families and the number of elevators to a call. We will walk through which of your breakdowns are preceded by a detectable signal, what the interface would look like on your panels, and what a phase one deployment covers.