Free tool · 3 minutes · one email field
What is your technical debt costing you a year?
“The codebase is a mess” has never been funded. A dollar figure has. This calculator turns eight estimates you already know into the annual interest you’re paying on your debt — and a board-ready dashboard that makes the paydown case in the CFO’s own units.
What you walk away with
The number that gets debt funded.
McKinsey pegs technical debt at 15–20% of a typical IT budget, yet fewer than one in five engineering leaders rate themselves effective at managing it. The gap is a number nobody has computed. This is that number, for your org.
- Nº 01
Your annual interest, in dollars
Everyday drag, debt-driven incidents, and attrition — summed into the recurring cost you pay every year the debt stays.
- Nº 02
A risk band you can defend
Your interest as a share of engineering spend, banded against the thresholds the research keeps converging on.
- Nº 03
The three-year compounding view
What doing nothing costs versus a funded paydown allocation — the trade-off framed the way a CFO weighs it.
- Nº 04
The board-ready PDF brief
The dashboard, the talking points, and the questions you'll get — with answers that hold. Your company's name on it.
How it works
- i.
Set the denominator
Engineer count and fully-loaded cost — the spend your debt taxes.
- ii.
Estimate the drag
How much of the week goes to maintenance, and how much of that is avoidable debt rather than the normal cost of owning software.
- iii.
Count the hidden costs
Debt-driven incidents, attrition where the codebase pushed, and the share of your code your AI tools can't safely work in.
Built for
CTOs and VPs of Engineering who know the debt is real but keep losing the budget conversation — because “we need time to clean things up” is the easiest line item in the company to cut. This puts the interest in the CFO’s units before you ask for the principal.
Thresholds and framing grounded in Gartner and McKinsey research on technical debt economics. Directional by design — the honest version of the math, caveats included.
Part of the Tech Debt Paydown engagementQuestions, answered
About this calculator.
How the interest is computed, what it needs from you, and how far to trust the number.
- How much is technical debt costing my company per year?
- For most mid-size engineering orgs it's a seven-figure line item nobody has ever written down. This calculator computes it as interest — the recurring annual cost of carrying the debt — from three non-overlapping components: everyday drag on engineering time, debt-driven incidents, and attrition where the codebase pushed people out.
- What inputs do I need?
- Eight estimates you already know or can get in one Slack message: team size, fully loaded cost per engineer, the share of time going to maintenance, how much of that is avoidable debt, incident frequency and cleanup hours, debt-driven attrition, and how much of your codebase AI tools can't operate in. About three minutes end to end.
- How accurate is the number?
- Directional by design, and honest about it. The components don't overlap, the model leans conservative, and the result comes with a risk band rather than false precision. Its job is to move the paydown conversation from adjectives to dollars — a CFO can argue with your inputs, which is exactly the conversation you want.
- Does it count what AI tools can't do in our legacy code?
- Yes, but separately — forgone AI leverage is an opportunity cost, not money currently leaving the building, so it's reported alongside the interest headline rather than inflating it. That separation keeps the headline defensible while still showing what the debt is blocking.