What are the hours nobody covers actually worth?

How the numbers are calculated

Every figure uses the same formula, applied to three different amounts of time. Hours per week, multiplied by your hourly cost, multiplied by four weeks, multiplied by the number of people involved.

1. Manual work today. The hours you set on the slider. This is what the process costs you right now, at current effort.
2. Covered 8 hours a day. Forty hours a week, the standard working week. What continuous coverage during business hours would be worth in the same terms.
3. Covered around the clock. All 168 hours in a week. What it would be worth if the work never stopped.

The default hourly cost of €34 comes from the Eurostat average hourly labour cost for the EU, which sat at roughly €33.5 in 2024. Adjust it to your own fully loaded cost, which means salary plus employer contributions, not the take-home figure.

What these numbers are, and what they are not

They are coverage values expressed in human cost, not savings and not profit. None of them is money that will appear in your account. They answer a comparison question: what would this much coverage be worth if you bought it in people?

That is why the third figure is large. Covering 168 hours a week with staff would take roughly four and a half full-time employees per person you are replacing, before shift premiums and holiday cover. The number is not a promise, it is the size of the gap.

Use the difference between the first figure and the other two to decide whether the conversation is worth having. Do not present any of them to a finance director as a return.

What people get wrong when they estimate

Using salary instead of loaded cost

The hourly figure should include employer contributions, tooling, and overhead. Using the gross salary alone understates the real cost of an hour by a meaningful margin.

Counting the documented process, not the real one

The process as written has four steps. The process as performed has four steps plus a spreadsheet somebody maintains privately, plus a message to a colleague who knows the exceptions. Count the real one.

Forgetting that automation has a running cost

An automated process is a system. It breaks, it needs updating when the things around it change, and somebody has to notice when it stops. Any honest business case subtracts that.

Assuming every hour is worth covering

The 24/7 figure assumes there is work arriving at three in the morning worth handling. For a lead form or a customer message, there often is. For an internal report nobody reads until Monday, there is not. Judge which one you are looking at.

The limits of any calculator like this

• It values every hour at the same rate, which is rarely true in practice.
• It ignores the cost to build and maintain the automation.
• It ignores the failure path, which is where most automation projects actually die.
• It assumes the process will still exist in its current form next year.

Use it to decide whether a conversation is worth having. Do not use it as the business case. The real arithmetic is time saved per month, multiplied by how long the process will exist unchanged, minus what it costs to build and keep alive. We wrote about that in more detail in where AI automation pays off first.