€1.6M in Testing Costs a Year: How Much of It Is Avoidable?
A QA team of ten, at €100 per hour, adds up to roughly €1.6M in testing costs a year. A short worked example of how much of that you can save, and how to calculate your own number.
- roi
- testautomation
- qa
How much of your annual testing cost is actually avoidable? The question sounds abstract, but it gets very concrete the moment you run the numbers. So that's what we'll do: a short worked example of what an average QA team costs per year, and how big the share is that automation can win back.
A short worked example
Take a QA team of ten people at a fully loaded rate of €100 per hour. Fully loaded means not just salary, but everything an hour of work actually costs the company. For productive time we use 1,600 hours per person per year, so after holidays, sick leave and other downtime.
That gives a simple calculation:
10 people × €100/hr × 1,600 hrs = €1.6M per year
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Team size | 10 people |
| Fully loaded rate | €100/hr |
| Productive hours per year | 1,600 |
| Testing cost per year | €1.6M |
So €1.6M sits in this team's testing work alone. The real question isn't whether that sum is high, but how much of it goes into work nobody does willingly: test maintenance, patching broken selectors and triaging false alarms.
How much of it is avoidable?
This is where the lever is. When test maintenance and failure analysis largely run automatically, a big part of that effort disappears. In many environments the savings potential runs into the high six figures per year, and higher still at a high degree of automation.
Those hours are the actual gain. They become available again for real development, better test coverage and faster releases, instead of draining into recurring repair work.
Averages help nobody
As impressive as numbers like these are, they remain averages. Your team has a different size, a different hourly rate and a different level of automation. Whether your avoidable share is €200,000 or more than a million can only be answered with your own figures.
That's why we built an ROI calculator. You enter team size, hourly rate and degree of automation, and in under a minute you see your concrete savings potential, in euros and in hours saved.
What's your guess for how much your team currently burns on avoidable testing work? Run the numbers once. The figure surprises most people.