What 20-50% of Your Help Desk Tickets Are Actually Costing You

• Password-related issues account for 20 to 50% of all help desk tickets in the average enterprise, according to Gartner, and each reset costs roughly $70 in help desk labor, according to Forrester.
• That cost repeats constantly, not once, since the same underlying cause, a user-managed secret that gets forgotten, reused, or locked out, keeps generating tickets on an ongoing basis.
• Removing the password removes the ticket category entirely, rather than making it faster to resolve, which is a different and larger kind of savings than a self-service reset tool provides.
• Proximia's sign-in takes about two seconds, up to 18 times faster than a typical password-plus-push MFA flow, so the time saved compounds across every sign-in, not just the ones that go wrong.

Between 20 and 50% of all help desk tickets in the average enterprise are password-related, according to Gartner, and each one costs roughly $70 in help desk labor, according to Forrester. For a mid-sized organization, that is a recurring, budgetable cost most IT leaders already feel but rarely see broken out on its own line.

This piece breaks down where that cost actually comes from and what changes when the password itself is removed, rather than just made easier to reset.

Where the 20-50% Figure Actually Comes From

Gartner's 20-50% range and Forrester's roughly $70 per-reset figure are both widely cited, current industry benchmarks, not vendor-inflated numbers.

Password-related issues account for 20 to 50% of all help desk tickets in the average enterprise (Gartner), and the average help desk labor cost for a single password reset is roughly $70 (Forrester). That figure counts only direct help desk labor; it does not include the employee's own time spent locked out and waiting for the reset, which makes it a floor, not a full accounting of the cost.

Why This Cost Never Goes Away on Its Own

Password-related tickets are not a one-time onboarding cost. They recur continuously because the underlying cause, a user-managed secret that gets forgotten, reused, or locked out, never goes away on its own.

Seven in ten consumers and four in ten corporate users have reused an already-exposed password (SpyCloud, 2026 Identity Exposure Report), which is exactly the kind of behavior that produces lockouts, resets, and account-recovery tickets long after any rollout period ends. A self-service password reset tool reduces the friction of each individual ticket; it does not reduce the ticket category to zero, since the underlying cause is still there generating new ones.

The Difference Between Making Resets Faster and Removing Them Entirely

A self-service reset tool makes each ticket cheaper to resolve. Removing the password removes the ticket category itself, which is a different order of savings.

This is not only a cost question. More than 97% of identity attacks exploit password credentials (Microsoft Digital Defense Report 2025), so the same underlying cause driving help desk cost is also the single largest category of identity attack surface. Cost and risk trace back to the same root cause, which is worth remembering when the two conversations happen separately.

What Changes When the Credential Is Actually Removed

Continuous, presence-aware authentication does not make password resets easier. It removes the password from the user experience entirely, so there is nothing to forget, reuse, or lock out of.

Sign-in with live biometrics plus the XiFi Card takes roughly two seconds, up to 18 times faster than a typical password-plus-push or OTP flow (Proximia internal testing, benchmarked against published timing studies from Microsoft, Duo Security, Google, and the FIDO Alliance; the upper end of published industry timing ranges is used, so actual results vary). No user behavior change is required, and Proximia integrates alongside existing Active Directory, so there is no rip-and-replace.

At Kings County Superior Court, lockout-related help desk calls dropped by an estimated 99%, per Director of IT Jorge Lopez, with the small remainder traced to a physical cause, workstation cameras facing windows with backlighting, fixed by repositioning monitors rather than any product change. Worth noting for credibility: ease of use was a welcome side effect of that deployment, not the primary driver; closing a security gap was.

What This Means for Budgeting the Fix

A 20-50% reduction in one specific, well-defined ticket category is the kind of savings a CFO can model directly against help desk headcount and average ticket cost, not a vague productivity claim.

Initial configuration for a workstation typically completes in under two hours, and onboarding averages about six minutes per person for biometric enrollment and XiFi Card provisioning, which makes the payback timeline short relative to a cost that would otherwise keep recurring indefinitely. Proximia's ROI calculator and time savings calculator let you model these numbers against your own organization's help desk volume and headcount rather than relying on industry averages alone.

Ready to Close the Gap?

Model your own numbers with Proximia's ROI calculator at proximia.com/roi-calculator, or schedule a demo at proximia.com/contact.