What Is Authentication Friction
Costing Your Organization?
Every login, reset, and lockout drains time and money — quietly, every day.
Enter your numbers to see the real cost.
Your Organization
👤
250
10
$
40
$
50
What You're Losing
$946,750
Lost to authentication friction annually
↓ $78,896 Lost every month
1,816.3 hrs
Employee and IT hours lost per month
10.32 FTE
Full-time employees consumed by authentication overhead, per month
Annual Cost by Source
Employee Time
—
sign-in friction
+ cognitive recovery
+ cognitive recovery
IT Overhead
—
resets, lockouts
+ alert review
+ alert review
View Cost Breakdown
▼
A · Sign-In Friction
$11,000/mo
275.0 hrs/mo · 1.56 FTE
Time lost per sign-in × daily logins × all users, valued at the employee hourly rate.
B · Cognitive Recovery
$36,667
916.7 hrs/month · 5.21 FTE
Assumption, not a measurement: 60 sec of refocus time per sign-in. No study measures this per sign-in, and the widely quoted 23-minute figure describes resuming an interrupted task, not signing in. This is the largest line here, so toggle it off to see the total without it.
C · IT Resets & Lockouts
$16,563
331.3 hrs/month · 1.88 FTE
Gartner puts password-related tickets at 20 to 50% of help desk volume. Modeling assumptions: 2 resets per user per month, a 1.5% MFA lockout rate, and 15 min of IT time per incident.
D · Identity Alert Review
$14,667
293.3 hrs/month · 1.67 FTE
Modeling assumptions, not published benchmarks: 4% of sign-in events raise an alert an analyst reviews, at 8 min each. Adjust your expectation if your alerting is tuned differently.
Sign-in times: password plus one-time passcode averaged 21.6 seconds across five weeks of live corporate sign-ins (Lassak et al., SOUPS 2025), and full SMS two-factor sign-ins had a median of 38 to 50 seconds among first-time users in a lab study (Ciolino et al., SOUPS 2019); password-only entry measured 7.5 to 15 seconds (Lassak 2025; Melicher et al., CHI 2016). This calculator uses the upper end of that spread. Help desk volume: Gartner puts password-related tickets at 20 to 50% of all tickets. Everything else on this page, including reset frequency, lockout rate, alert rate, handling times and refocus time, is a modeling assumption rather than a published benchmark, and each one is stated in the cost breakdown above.
Annual figures assume 22 workdays per month across 12 months (264 workdays per year) and do not deduct public holidays or paid time off; a typical US work year after both is closer to 250 days, so annual figures run roughly 5% high on that basis alone. FTE here means one full-time-equivalent month of 176 hours. This calculator is provided for estimation purposes only and may not reflect your organization's specific environment.
Annual figures assume 22 workdays per month across 12 months (264 workdays per year) and do not deduct public holidays or paid time off; a typical US work year after both is closer to 250 days, so annual figures run roughly 5% high on that basis alone. FTE here means one full-time-equivalent month of 176 hours. This calculator is provided for estimation purposes only and may not reflect your organization's specific environment.
Ready to Stop Losing Time?
Connect with us to learn how organizations like yours have eliminated this overhead entirely.