Technical Debt Calculator
Quantify the hidden cost of technical debt on your engineering team. See how much productivity you're losing and get actionable insights.
What This Calculator Measures
Annual Waste
Direct cost of time spent on maintenance vs. new features
Productivity Impact
How much slower your team ships due to debt
CTO Insights
Actionable recommendations based on your metrics
How to Use This Calculator
- 1Enter your team size and average developer salary
- 2Estimate the percentage of time spent on maintenance vs. new features
- 3See your annual waste, opportunity cost, and get personalized recommendations
How to Measure Technical Debt: The 4-Step Method
The calculator above automates this method. If you want to run it by hand — or defend the number in front of a board — here is exactly how it works.
- 1
Measure your maintenance share
Categorise the last 4-6 sprints of work into "new value" vs "maintenance" (bug fixes, workarounds, firefighting, keeping integrations alive). Ticket labels or a one-off audit of closed issues both work. Healthy teams spend 15-20% on maintenance; debt-heavy teams spend 40-60%.
- 2
Establish your fully-loaded engineer cost
Take average salary plus employer taxes, benefits and tooling — typically salary × 1.3 to 1.5. This converts wasted time into money the rest of the business understands.
- 3
Calculate the annual waste
Annual waste = team size × fully-loaded cost × (your maintenance share − 20% healthy baseline). A 10-person team at £85,000 loaded cost spending 45% on maintenance is burning about £212,000 a year above baseline.
- 4
Add the opportunity cost
Estimate revenue from the roadmap items that slipped because capacity went to maintenance. This is usually larger than the direct waste — and it is the number that changes board conversations.
What about static-analysis tools?
Tools like SonarQube, CodeScene or code-churn analytics measure where debt lives in the codebase — useful for prioritising remediation. But they measure code quality, not business cost. Boards and investors respond to the time-based method above: it turns debt into a £ figure and a delivery-speed problem. Use both: this calculator for the business case, static analysis for the fix list.
Need Help Reducing Your Technical Debt?
A fractional CTO can help you create a technical debt reduction strategy, prioritize refactoring, and build sustainable engineering practices.
Get a Technical Assessment