Compliance Cost Calculator

A three-step calculator that quantifies the hours, cost and full-time equivalent your organisation loses to manual compliance work. In about two minutes you will see where the time really goes. No email needed to start. You choose whether to unlock the full report.

Three questions that turn effort into a number

Most teams know compliance takes too long. Almost nobody knows how much.

  • The shape of your organisation: total employees, how many external audits or assessments you go through each year, and which frameworks are in scope, including ISO 27001, ISO 9001, GDPR, SOC 2, NIS2 and DORA.
  • The work that still happens by hand: which compliance activities your team still does by hand, and roughly how many hours a week and how many people each one takes, covering evidence collection, policy reviews, risk assessments, audit preparation, spreadsheet maintenance, vendor reviews, training records and incident logging.
  • What an hour of that work costs: a fully loaded hourly cost for the people doing the work, and any annual spend on external consultants or auditors.

The cost, and where it is hiding

A number you can take to your leadership team, and a breakdown that shows which activity is draining the most time.

  • Total annual hours lost to manual compliance work.
  • The annual cost, split between internal labour and external spend.
  • Full-time equivalent, so you can see it as headcount rather than a number.
  • Breakdown by activity, ranked by which is draining the most time.
  • Highest-impact actions to take back that time, starting with your biggest driver.
  • Downloadable PDF you can download and share with your leadership team.

Every assumption, in the open

A supplier telling you what your problem costs is worth nothing unless you can check the working.

  • Hours: for each activity you select, we take your hours per week multiplied by the number of people involved, then annualise it across a standard working year.
  • Audit periods: activities affected by audits are weighted to reflect the spike in the weeks before an assessment.
  • Cost: annual hours multiplied by your fully loaded hourly cost. The default of 65 euro an hour is a mid market estimate for compliance and risk staff, covering salary, benefits and on costs.
  • External spend: any consultant or auditor spend you enter is added on top of internal labour cost.
  • Full-time equivalent: total annual hours divided by a standard full-time working year.

The output is an estimate, not an audit. It is only as good as the figures you put in, and it is designed to show you the shape of the problem rather than an exact number.

For teams who suspect the number is bad

Organisations of roughly ten to two hundred and fifty people who manage compliance across spreadsheets, shared drives and email. If you are preparing for certification, maintaining ISO or GDPR obligations, or responding to client security questionnaires alongside everything else, this shows you what that work is actually costing. It is most useful when you already suspect the effort is too high but have never put a number on it.

Built by people who have done this work

The activities and the weightings come from implementing and auditing these systems, not from a template. The same experience sits behind Wizard, our GRC platform.

Common questions

How long does it take? About two minutes. Is it really free? Yes. How accurate is the result? It is an estimate based on the figures you enter, and you can replace our default hourly cost with your own. What if I do not know our hourly cost? Leave the default. Do you keep the numbers I enter? Your figures produce your report and are saved to your dashboard, and we do not share them. Can I run it again? Yes. You may also want the Compliance Health Check.