MTTR Calculator
Calculate mean time to recovery from incident detection to full resolution.
About MTTR Calculator
MTTR (Mean Time To Recovery/Repair) is the average time it takes to restore service after an incident begins: MTTR = total_downtime ÷ number_of_incidents. Projecting the observed incident rate forward to a full year gives a sense of the total annualized downtime impact if current reliability trends continue unchanged — useful for prioritizing incident response investments against their expected payoff.
Formula
MTTR = totalDowntime / numberOfIncidents
- D
- Total downtime in minutes across all incidents
- I
- Number of incidents in the measurement period
- \text{MTTR}
- Mean Time To Recovery in minutes
Worked example
With the default values below, MTTR Calculator returns Mean Time To Recovery of 30.00. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.
Inputs used
- Total Downtimeaccepts 0–1,000,000 minutes
- 180 minutes
- Number of Incidentsaccepts 1–100,000 incidents
- 6 incidents
- Measurement Periodaccepts 1–3,650 days
- 90 days
Results
- Mean Time To Recovery
- 30.00 minutes
- Mean Time To Recovery
- 0.500 hours
- Annualized Downtime
- 730.0 minutes/year
- Annualized Downtime
- 12.17 hours/year
- Annualized Incident Count
- 24.3 incidents/year
Step by step
- 1MTTR: total downtime ÷ incident count= 30.00 min
- 2Incident rate= 0.067 incidents/day
- 3Annualized incidents= 24.3
- 4Annualized downtime: incidents/yr × MTTR= 730.0 min
Assumptions and limits
- The result is derived only from the 3 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
- In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax or fees or charges into account.
- Figures are rounded for display to 3 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.
How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is MTTR the same as MTTA or MTBF?
No — MTTA (Mean Time To Acknowledge) measures detection-to-acknowledgment, MTTR measures acknowledgment (or detection) to full resolution, and MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) measures the gap between incidents, not their resolution speed.
What's a good MTTR target?
It varies heavily by system criticality — high-availability services often target MTTR under 30-60 minutes, while less critical internal tools may tolerate several hours.
How can I reduce MTTR?
Faster detection (better alerting), clearer runbooks, automated rollback/remediation, and practiced incident response (game days, postmortems) are the highest-leverage levers.
Does one long outage skew MTTR unfairly?
Yes — MTTR is an average, so a single multi-hour outage can dominate the metric. Many teams also track median recovery time or a 90th-percentile MTTR alongside the mean to catch this.