Technical Debt in Dollars: How to Measure What You Can't See

The Invisible Tax

Every company with legacy code pays a tax. It shows up as:

• Slower development cycles
• More bugs in production
• Higher onboarding costs
• Delayed feature releases

But when the CFO asks “How much is this costing us?”, most engineering leaders shrug.

Making Debt Visible

Technical debt isn’t just a feeling. It’s measurable. Here’s how we quantify it:

Direct Costs

• Hours spent on bug fixes by feature area
• Cost of rework from reopened tickets
• Production incident response time
• Emergency fixes outside business hours

Shadow Costs

• Features that take 3x longer than they should
• Engineers avoiding certain parts of the codebase
• New hires taking 6 months to become productive
• Cloud costs from inefficient architecture

Opportunity Costs

• Features you can’t build because the team is fighting fires
• Markets you can’t enter because the system won’t scale
• Competitors moving faster because they’re not carrying your debt

The ROI Calculation

Once you can measure the cost, you can calculate ROI for fixing it.

If technical debt costs you $500K per year in slow velocity, and you can fix the top 3 constraints for $150K, you have a 3-month payback period.

That’s a conversation CFOs understand.

Start Measuring

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. Start tracking:

• Time spent on bugs vs new features
• Which files cause the most production incidents
• Where engineers spend the most time debugging
• Features that consistently take longer than estimated

The data tells the story. And the story gets you the budget to fix it.