Free tool · Modeled estimate
The Engineering Tax Calculator
Every engineering org pays a tax: the share of spend that goes to rework, waiting, firefighting, and building the wrong thing — work that produces no customer value. It is typically 25–45% of the budget. This tool models yours in seconds.
It is a transparent model, not a measurement. Move the sliders to reflect your reality; the headline updates live and free. Every assumption is on the page so you can pressure-test it. Figures are indicative and founder-reviewable.
Salary + on-costs + tooling. Default ~£110k.
Waste signals — where the time goes
Re-running unreliable pipelines, chasing false failures, and re-doing work that shipped wrong the first time. Time spent re-touching code that was already 'done'.
Engineers idle while builds, tests, and deploys queue and run. Context lost to long feedback loops and manual release steps.
Unplanned work: on-call toil, production incidents, and the recovery tax of interrupt-driven days that never reach the roadmap.
Building the wrong thing, then rebuilding it. Half-finished initiatives, reprioritised mid-flight, and features that ship but move no customer metric.
Estimated engineering tax
£1.1M/ year
20% of a £5.5M engineering budget
- Total engineering spend
- £5,500,000
- Value-producing spend
- £4,400,000
Indicative estimate · founder-reviewable · not a measurement
Unlock the breakdown
See exactly where the £1.1M goes
The headline is free. Enter your work email to reveal the per-driver breakdown — how much each waste signal costs you per year, and a short note on where that spend leaks. We'll send you a copy.
Work email required. This is a transparent model, not an audit — the breakdown makes the assumptions explicit so you can pressure-test them.
How the model works
Transparent by design
Total engineering spend is engineers multiplied by fully-loaded annual cost. Each waste signal is assigned a maximum plausible share of engineering capacity it can consume at full severity — grounded in commonly-cited industry ranges and kept deliberately conservative. A driver's cost is total spend times its severity times that maximum share. The four drivers are chosen to be roughly non-overlapping, so the model tops out near 50% of spend at maximum severity and lands around 25% at mid-range.
This is an estimate to start a conversation, not an audited figure. To measure the real number for your org — with evidence from your own pipelines, incidents, and delivery data — a bounded assessment is the next step.