The Cost of Dealership Downtime: A Worksheet to Put a Number on an Outage

The cost of dealership downtime is the gross profit you lose and don’t get back, plus extra recovery costs like overtime, outside IT help and floor plan interest, for every hour a system is down. Work it out one system at a time, with your own numbers.

Last updated: November 13, 2026

One of our early dealer clients ran the techs’ electronic dispatch on a $50 home router. It went down constantly. Every time it did, the dispatch went down with it. I talked them into a corporate-grade device at 10 times the price, and it worked. On the invoice, the $50 router had been the cheap option. That’s the trap.

Ask a dealer what an hour down costs and you might get a confident round number. On our team, the one we hear is $50,000 an hour. Ask how they got there and the confidence goes. The real number for your store could be higher or lower. Without the math, nobody knows.

Guessing doesn’t help you decide anything. You can’t tell whether a second internet line, a spare firewall, or a faster backup restore is worth paying for until you know what an hour costs at your store. This worksheet gives you the method, not an industry average. You bring the numbers. It’s a good place to start before any conversation about managed IT services for dealerships.

What Does an Hour of Downtime Cost a Dealership?

An hour of downtime costs a dealership the gross profit from deals, repair orders, and parts sales that don’t happen and don’t come back later, plus the extra costs of recovering, such as overtime, outside IT help, and floor plan interest on units that sit. It differs for every store and for every system that fails.

There’s a fast way to get a first number. Take annual revenue, divide by 12 for a month, by 30 for a day, then by the hours you’re open. A store doing $90 million a year and open 10 hours a day gets $90,000,000 ÷ 12 ÷ 30 ÷ 10, which is $25,000 an hour. That’s a starting point. It also overstates the loss, for two reasons. Revenue isn’t what you lose, because a car you don’t sell also doesn’t cost you the car, so the real loss is the gross. And some customers come back on Tuesday to finish the deal they couldn’t sign on Saturday.

So the worksheet uses gross, and it asks you to be honest about how much business actually comes back. That’s also how Anderson Economic Group measured dealer losses after the June 2024 DMS attack: lost earnings, not lost sales, plus the extra costs of getting back up. In the example further down, those two changes take the number from $25,000 an hour to $1,900.

Revenue tells you how big the store is. Gross tells you what the outage cost.

Which Systems Can Go Down, and What Stops When They Do?

A dealership doesn’t have one “down.” It has several, and each one stops something different. Start with the internet connection. If your DMS is hosted, your email runs on Microsoft 365, your phones are hosted, and your card terminals process over the network, they can all go down with it. Sales, service, F&I, the parts counter. And if your service drive no longer has a paper RO process, it doesn’t slow down. It stops.

Go system by system. For each line, write down what stops at your store and what an hour of that costs you.

Look at the first row again, then count the firewalls your store runs through. If it’s one, and that one piece of hardware dies, your lifeline is completely down, and every other row on the sheet goes with it. A second internet line has the same trap. Two connections don’t help if the failover was never set up and tested, and a store can find that out in the middle of a Saturday. Our post on dealership internet failover covers how to check yours, second firewall included.

The cheapest line on this sheet can be the one that takes the rest down with it.

How Do You Fill In the Worksheet?

Fill it in from last quarter’s numbers out of the DMS and your accounting, not from memory. You want per-day averages for sales, service, and parts gross, plus the overtime rate for the people who’d have to catch up afterward. A busy Saturday and a slow Tuesday are really two different stores, so if you have the patience, run both.

Here’s what that looks like for a single-point store, with numbers I made up to show the math. They aren’t benchmarks, so replace every one of them with yours.

You’ll notice there’s no line for wages paid to people standing around. That’s on purpose. You pay them either way, and that pay comes out of the gross you already counted, so adding it again would count the same dollar twice. Where idle time costs you extra is the overtime to catch up, and that goes on the extra-costs line.

So the example store loses about $1,900 an hour in gross with everything down, before extra costs. That’s a lot less than the $25,000 the revenue shortcut gave it and nowhere close to $50,000. I’m not trying to talk anybody out of taking downtime seriously, though. Four hours on a Saturday at that rate is $7,600 before you’ve paid a dime of overtime, and that’s the number I’d want on the table the next time somebody asks whether a second firewall or a backup circuit is worth the money. The point of the math was never to scare anybody. It’s to put a price on both sides of the decision.

Some costs won’t fit neatly in a cell. When the service lane is slow it can show up in CSI, and if some of your manufacturer incentive money is tied to CSI scores, I’d put that program’s terms right next to the service line so nobody forgets it. A customer who stood at a frozen write-up and decided not to come back won’t show up on any report. You just never see them again.

Recovery Time and Recovery Point: Every Answer Has a Price

The worksheet tells you what an hour costs. The next question is how many hours you’re willing to buy your way out of. Backup and recovery people use two terms for this, and NIST’s contingency planning guide, SP 800-34, defines both. The recovery time objective is “the overall length of time an information system’s components can be in the recovery phase before negatively impacting the organization’s mission or mission/business processes.” The recovery point objective is “the point in time to which data must be recovered after an outage.”

In dealership terms, how long until the DMS is back? And when it comes back, does it have this morning’s deals or yesterday’s? The same NIST guide is blunt about the trade-off: “the shorter the RTO, the more expensive the recovery solutions cost to implement.” Recovery point works the same way, since keeping data current to the last 10 minutes takes more frequent backups or replication than keeping last night’s copy. Each answer comes with a price, and that’s fine. You just want to choose it on purpose instead of finding out after the fact.

• Pick your recovery time for each system from the worksheet. The DMS and internet may need a much shorter one than the shared drive does.
• Recovery point is about data. How many deals, ROs, and payments could you stand to re-enter by hand?
• Multiply. If your recovery time for the DMS is 8 hours, the worksheet says what those 8 hours cost.
• Price the setup that hits that target, and compare. NIST calls this balancing “the cost of system inoperability against the cost of resources required for restoring the system.” A faster restore is worth it when it costs less than the hours it saves.
• Then test it. NIST’s guide says “testing validates recovery capabilities,” and a recovery time nobody has tried is a guess.

NIST also uses a third term, maximum tolerable downtime, for how long a process “can be disrupted without causing significant harm.” Write it down for each system. Our backup and disaster recovery for dealerships page covers how we handle backups and restores.

What a Cyberattack Does to the Math

Everything above assumes an outage measured in hours. A ransomware attack can be measured in weeks. CDK Global’s 2023 State of Cybersecurity in the Dealership report, citing outside 2023 ransomware research, put the average length of downtime from a ransomware attack at 3.4 weeks. In CDK’s 2024 survey, 35% of auto dealers reported a cyberattack or incident that year, and 92% said it resulted in a negative financial or operational impact.

Run the example store through that. Six open days a week for 3.4 weeks is about 20 days, or 204 open hours. At $1,900 an hour that’s roughly $388,000 in gross, before extra costs, and over three weeks the hourly number is unlikely to hold steady. Staff can find workarounds, customers can drift to the store down the road, and recovery costs can pile up. Nor do you have to be the one who gets hit. After the June 2024 attack on a major DMS provider, Anderson Economic Group estimated direct losses to franchised dealers at $1.02 billion for the three calendar weeks that included June 19 and ran through July 5. That figure counts lost earnings on new and used vehicles, parts, and service, plus additional staffing, IT service, and floor plan interest costs, the same lines this worksheet uses.

Keep the worksheet with your DMS outage plan and your incident response plan. A breach stops your sales floor, and this tells you what each day of that costs.

Questions Dealers Ask About Downtime Cost

Put a Real Number on It

I still think about that $50 router, and how cheap it looked on the invoice.

Your worksheet doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be yours, built from your own deals, ROs, and costs, so the next time somebody pitches you a fix you can tell whether it pays for itself. It’s also the number to build your dealership IT budget around.

If you want a second set of eyes on your setup, start with our complimentary IT and cybersecurity assessment. It’s a no-cost look at where your technology and security actually stand, covering your current systems, security posture, and vendor spend.

A round number never told anybody what to fix.