Does manufacturing downtime really cost $260,000 an hour?

That figure is a widely repeated vendor-commissioned survey number, credited inconsistently to ABB, ServiceMax, or Aberdeen depending on the source. It is an average from marketing research, not an independent measurement, and it does not describe any specific plant.

Where does the number come from?

Different carriers attribute the same $260,000-per-hour figure to different sponsors. All of them are vendor-commissioned surveys, and none publish the underlying data for inspection.

What does downtime actually cost my plant?

It depends on your throughput, margin, labor, and any penalties. Calculate it from your own numbers; a single industry-average dollar-per-hour figure tells an individual line almost nothing.

Not necessarily, but it is unverifiable. It is an average across all of manufacturing from vendor-sponsored surveys, with inconsistent attribution, so it should be cited as such rather than as a fact.

Manufacturing economy

The '$260,000 an hour' downtime figure: who actually said it?

Manufacturing downtime costs about $260,000 an hour. The figure anchors nearly every article, vendor deck, and ROI pitch about uptime, quoted as if it were an established fact.

Trace it and the ground shifts. One source credits a study sponsored by ServiceMax; another credits ABB's 2023 reliability study; a third points to an Aberdeen analyst report. Same number, different sponsors, and every one of them a vendor-commissioned survey rather than an independent measurement.

This page follows the $260,000 figure to the pages that carry it and is plain about what it is: a widely repeated survey number with inconsistent provenance.

Data covers The '$260,000 per hour' manufacturing-downtime figure and its attribution. Published 2026-07-21. Last reviewed 2026-07-21. Last updated 2026-07-21. Edited by Mike Ramsey / Reliable Media.

The figures and where they come from

Each figure is rated for how safely you can cite it today. Ratings judge current usability, not whether a number was ever correct.

Figure	What it is	Source	Citation Confidence	Notes
$260,000 / hour	Downtime cost per hour (attributed to ABB)	[A]	Low	One carrier states downtime costs an average of $260,000 per hour, crediting ABB's 2023 reliability study. A vendor-commissioned figure.
$260,000 / hour	Same figure (attributed to ServiceMax)	[B]	Low	A different carrier states the same $260,000-per-hour figure, crediting a ServiceMax-sponsored study instead. The number is identical; the source is not.

Why the numbers disagree

The tell is that the same precise number carries different origins. Trace the $260,000-per-hour figure and one page credits ABB's 2023 study, another a ServiceMax-sponsored survey, and others an Aberdeen analyst report. When a single figure is attributed to three different sponsors, it is being passed hand to hand rather than measured, and no one is checking the chain.

Every attribution also points to a vendor-commissioned source. These are surveys funded by companies that sell reliability, monitoring, or service software, whose interest is a large, scary downtime number. That does not make the figure wrong, but it means it comes from marketing research, not independent measurement, and the underlying data is not published for inspection.

The figure is also an average across wildly different situations. A minute of downtime on a high-volume automotive line and on a small job shop are not remotely comparable, so a single dollar-per-hour number averaged across all of manufacturing tells an individual plant almost nothing about its own cost.

How to cite these figures

If you cite $260,000 an hour, say it is a vendor-commissioned survey figure with inconsistent attribution, not an independent measurement.

For your own plant, calculate downtime cost from your own numbers: lost throughput, margin, labor, and any penalty clauses. The industry average does not describe your line.

Be wary of any single dollar-per-hour downtime figure. The real cost varies enormously by product, volume, and how the downtime is handled.

Where people go wrong

Quoting $260,000 an hour as an established, independent fact. It traces to vendor-commissioned surveys, credited inconsistently to different sponsors.

Applying an industry average to a specific plant. Downtime cost swings by orders of magnitude across products and volumes.

Assuming the attribution is settled. Different carriers credit ABB, ServiceMax, or Aberdeen for the same number.

How we checked

We traced the $260,000-per-hour figure to the pages that carry it and confirmed the number appears in each, along with its differing attributions, to ABB in one and to a ServiceMax-sponsored study in another.

We did not find an independent, published dataset behind the figure. The sources are vendor-commissioned surveys whose raw data is not available for inspection, so we report the number as a survey figure with inconsistent provenance rather than a measurement.

Both figures are rated Low, not because downtime is cheap, but because the specific $260,000 number is an unverifiable average from marketing research, and it should not be cited as a neutral fact.

Full source list

Primary sources, with live links. Every figure above traces to one of these.

[A]SeqentAccessed July 14, 2026
Seqent, "The True Cost of Unplanned Downtime by Industry," citing the $260,000-per-hour figure to ABB's 2023 reliability study
https://seqent.com/the-true-cost-of-unplanned-downtime-by-industry/
[B]MachineMetricsAccessed July 14, 2026
MachineMetrics, "The Real Cost of Downtime in Manufacturing," citing the figure to a ServiceMax-sponsored study
https://www.machinemetrics.com/blog/the-real-cost-of-downtime-in-manufacturing

Common questions

Does manufacturing downtime really cost $260,000 an hour?: That figure is a widely repeated vendor-commissioned survey number, credited inconsistently to ABB, ServiceMax, or Aberdeen depending on the source. It is an average from marketing research, not an independent measurement, and it does not describe any specific plant.
Where does the number come from?: Different carriers attribute the same $260,000-per-hour figure to different sponsors. All of them are vendor-commissioned surveys, and none publish the underlying data for inspection.
What does downtime actually cost my plant?: It depends on your throughput, margin, labor, and any penalties. Calculate it from your own numbers; a single industry-average dollar-per-hour figure tells an individual line almost nothing.
Is the figure wrong?: Not necessarily, but it is unverifiable. It is an average across all of manufacturing from vendor-sponsored surveys, with inconsistent attribution, so it should be cited as such rather than as a fact.

More data, traced to source

Robot reliability numbers: the vendor claims and the one independent study
Manufacturers advertise robot uptime in the high nineties and mean time between failures in the tens of thousands of hours. The one independent study of more than 400 factories found a robot cell is reliable 88 percent of the time, with 87 minutes between failures.
Do robots really run 24/7? The measured runtime is far lower
The pitch is that robots run around the clock. The best measured data on manufacturing machine runtime shows a median of 32% and a weighted average of 54.5%. The 24/7 figure is a ceiling, not a norm.
The 3x robot integration rule: where the number actually comes from
The rule that a robot cell costs about three times the robot is quoted in nearly every automation-budgeting article. It traces to a 2015 consulting report almost nobody can open, quotable only through one trade editorial.