Technical Debt Cost Calculator
Quantify the cost of technical debt. Calculate how much productivity you're losing and build a case for refactoring.
Enter Your Data
Defaults to ~$100/hr if not specified. A $150k salary with 1.3x overhead is ~$200k fully-loaded.
Industry average: 23-42% of developer time is spent on debt. Suggest estimating 20-30%.
Optional: Incident Costs
Enter your team size and at least one cost factor above to calculate your debt burden.
What Counts as Technical Debt?
Technical debt is the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution now instead of using a better approach that would take longer. Like financial debt, it accumulates interest - the longer you wait to address it, the more expensive it becomes.
Old, hard-to-modify code that slows changes
Security risks and compatibility issues
Tightly coupled systems, monoliths, poor abstractions
Fear of changes, regression bugs, manual QA
Long build times, flaky tests, manual deployments
Tribal knowledge, onboarding friction
Industry Statistics
- - Developers spend 23-42% of their time dealing with technical debt (Stripe, 2018)
- - Companies lose $85 billion annually due to technical debt (Stripe)
- - Addressing debt can improve developer productivity by 30-50%
- - The "interest" on unaddressed debt compounds at roughly 25% per year
Severity Assessment Guide
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