Technical Debt Calculator

Technical debt costs engineering teams in two ways: direct time spent maintaining/fixing legacy code (typically 15-30% of engineering time), and velocity drag from working around technical limitations (10-25% slower feature development). Combined, tech debt can consume 25-50% of engineering capacity in mature codebases.

10 engineers × 80k avg salary = 800k total eng cost. 20% direct debt time = 160k. 15% velocity drag = 120k. Total tech debt cost: 280k/year or 35% of engineering budget. That's the amount you'd recover by eliminating all tech debt (impossible in practice - but 50% reduction is achievable with focused effort).

Tech debt is like financial debt: manageable when small, crushing when large. The interest rate on tech debt is the velocity drag - every sprint, existing debt makes new features take longer. Best organisations budget 15-20% of engineering time for deliberate debt reduction, targeting highest-drag areas first.

Run it with sensible defaults

Using engineering team size of 10, avg engineer salary of 80,000, tech debt time of 20%, velocity drag of 15%, the calculation works out to 280,000.00. The defaults are meant as a starting point, not a recommendation.

The levers in this calculation

The inputs — Engineering Team Size, Avg Engineer Salary, Tech Debt Time %, and Velocity Drag % — do not pull with equal force. Not every input has equal weight. Adjusting one input at a time toward extreme values shows which ones move the result most.

How the math works

Direct cost = team × salary × debt time %. Velocity cost = team × salary × drag %. Total = sum.

What the score tells you

Headline financial numbers — income, savings, debt — each tell part of the story. This calculation stitches several together into a single read you can track over time. The value is in the direction, not the absolute number.

What this doesn't capture

The score is a composite of the inputs you provide. Life context — job security, family obligations, health, housing — doesn't appear in the math but shapes the real picture. Use the number as a prompt, not a verdict.