Fax staff time calculator
How many staff hours a week go into sending, receiving and filing faxes, and what that time costs.
Cover sheet, dialling, waiting, confirming, refiling. Time it once rather than guessing.
Collecting, identifying who it is for, scanning or filing, chasing anything unclear.
Busy signals, bad numbers, partial transmissions. Zero if you genuinely never re-send.
Wage plus employer taxes and benefits, for whoever actually does this work.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent to VitalFax or stored anywhere.
- Staff time on fax
7.6hours per week
19% of one full-time post.
- Over a year
- 395.2hours
- Annual cost of that time
- $11,065.60
- Of which re-sending
- 13.9hours per year
Time spent sending something a second time.
Working
(50 × 4 min) + 8% re-sends + (80 × 3 min) = 456 min/week
Read this with the result
- Your own numbers in, your own numbers out. Nothing here is benchmarked against other practices, because a benchmark you cannot check is not evidence.
- This counts time, not salary saved. Hours freed usually move to other work rather than off the payroll, which is a benefit but not a cash saving — claiming otherwise would be the dishonest version of this calculator.
About this calculation
The cost of a fax line is on a bill somebody can find. The cost of the time around it — walking to the machine, waiting for a confirmation, re-sending a failed page, scanning the inbound pile and filing it — is not on any bill, which is why it is usually left out of the comparison entirely. This puts a number on it from your own volumes and your own wage.
Formula
hours = (faxes × minutes each) ÷ 60; cost = hours × loaded hourly rate
- Methodology version
- 1.0.0
- Last reviewed
- 2026-10-29
What this does not account for
- Counts time only. It says nothing about whether the work itself is necessary.
- A loaded hourly rate — wage plus employer taxes and benefits — gives a truer figure than a wage alone, and is usually 20–30% higher. The field takes whichever you enter.