Technical Debt Calculator

Q: How do you calculate technical debt?

In money: hours lost per engineer per week × 52 × loaded hourly pay × number of engineers, plus the cost of features shipping late. Five engineers on a $135,980 salary losing 8 hours a week cost about $196,500 a year before any roadmap delay. In the code: SonarQube's technical debt ratio is the estimated remediation cost divided by the development cost, set by default at 30 minutes per line of code (SonarQube metric definitions).

Q: What does a 6-month clean-up cost?

One Second Talent engineer for six months costs $32,994 at $5,499 a month ($29 to $39 USD an hour, billed monthly). A US software developer at the 75th percentile of pay, $171,980 a year (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025), costs about $124,300 for the same six months once benefits and payroll taxes are added (BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026). The calculator assumes the clean-up removes 70% of the yearly cost.

Put a dollar number on the technical debt slowing your engineering team: hours lost each week, slower shipping, the cost over three years if nothing changes, and the payback on a 6-month clean-up.

How to calculate technical debt

Annual cost of technical debt = hours lost per engineer per week × 52 × loaded hourly pay × engineers, plus the share of roadmap output the debt delays. To size the debt itself, use the technical debt ratio = remediation cost ÷ development cost, the formula SonarQube uses.

1. Your team

Engineering team size

Engineers affected by the debt

Average salary

US median, software developers

Engineering budget

Per year, for velocity cost

2. The debt

Hours lost per week

Per engineer: workarounds, rework

Roadmap slowdown

Your estimate of output lost

Debt growth per year

If left untouched

Annual cost of debt

3-year cost if untouched

Clean-up payback

Net 3-year savings

Payback and savings are for a 6-month Second Talent clean-up compared with doing nothing.

Where the annual cost comes from

Productivity loss (wasted hours)$0

Velocity loss (roadmap delayed)$0

In context

Share of engineering budget0%

Lost per engineer per week$0

What this debt costs you vs what a fix costs

Do nothing: 3-year cost

US senior engineer, 6-month clean-up

Second Talent engineer, 6-month clean-up

Hours are costed at loaded pay: salary divided by the 69.2% wage share of total compensation (BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026), over 2,080 hours a year. The 6-month clean-up compares one Second Talent engineer at $5,499 a month ($29 to $39 USD an hour, billed monthly) with a US software developer at the 75th percentile of pay ($171,980, BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025), fully loaded. Debt growth, roadmap slowdown and the assumption that a clean-up recovers 70% of the annual cost are planning inputs, not benchmarks.

How to calculate technical debt

Three ways to put a number on it. The calculator above uses the first and third; the second sizes the debt in the code itself.

Hours lost

Ask engineers how many hours a week go to workarounds, slow builds, flaky tests and rework, then multiply by 52, by loaded hourly pay and by headcount. In Stripe's survey, the average developer spent 13.5 hours of a 41.1-hour week on technical debt, about a third (Stripe Developer Coefficient survey, September 2018).

Technical debt ratio

Static analysis tools estimate the minutes needed to fix each maintainability issue. SonarQube divides that total by the cost to develop the code, 30 minutes per line by default: debt ratio = remediation cost ÷ (30 minutes × lines of code). A ratio of 5% or less rates A; 50% or more rates E (SonarQube metric definitions).

Roadmap drag

Debt also delays features. The calculator values that as your estimate of the slowdown times the engineering budget. It is the most subjective input, so agree it with your team and check it against how long similar features took a year ago.

Technical debt questions, answered

How do you calculate technical debt?

In money: hours lost per engineer per week × 52 × loaded hourly pay × number of engineers, plus the cost of features shipping late. Five engineers on a $135,980 salary losing 8 hours a week cost about $196,500 a year before any roadmap delay. In the code: SonarQube's technical debt ratio is the estimated remediation cost divided by the development cost, set by default at 30 minutes per line of code (SonarQube metric definitions).

What is a good technical debt ratio?

SonarQube's default maintainability rating gives an A at a debt ratio of 5% or less, B from 5% to 10%, C from 10% to 20%, D from 20% to 50% and E at 50% or more. Its documentation's worked example is 122,563 minutes of debt in 63,987 lines of code, a ratio of 6.4% (SonarQube metric definitions).

How much time do developers spend on technical debt?

In Stripe's Developer Coefficient survey of developers and C-level executives in six countries, the average developer worked 41.1 hours a week and spent 13.5 hours of it on technical debt and 3.8 hours on bad code. Developers estimated 17.3 hours a week went on maintenance such as debugging and refactoring (Stripe Developer Coefficient survey, September 2018). Pick the 13.5-hour option above to use the survey average.

How do I measure the hours my team loses?

Count the time that would not exist in a healthy codebase: waiting on slow builds, re-running flaky tests, working around legacy code, fixing a fragile local environment and answering questions the documentation should cover. Ask engineers to log it for two normal weeks, then take the average per engineer per week.

Where does the velocity loss figure come from?

Feature shipping slowdown times engineering budget. If your team ships 30% slower than it would on a healthy codebase, 30% of the engineering budget is producing nothing that reaches customers. It overlaps with the hours figure, so if you count the hours carefully, use a lower slowdown.

Why does the calculator let the cost rise each year?

New features built on unstable code inherit its workarounds, so the cost tends to rise if nothing is paid down. The growth rate is an assumption, not a benchmark: choose 0% to see the cost with no growth, or a higher rate if the debt is getting worse each release.

What does a 6-month clean-up cost?

One Second Talent engineer for six months costs $32,994 at $5,499 a month ($29 to $39 USD an hour, billed monthly). A US software developer at the 75th percentile of pay, $171,980 a year (BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025), costs about $124,300 for the same six months once benefits and payroll taxes are added (BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026). The calculator assumes the clean-up removes 70% of the yearly cost.

What if my team cannot spare an engineer for 6 months?

Narrow the scope. Pick the most expensive problem (slow CI, flaky tests or one legacy module), measure the hours it costs today and run a 2-month clean-up on that alone. Then measure again: if the hours drop, the next piece of work is easier to justify.

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