Data Breach Calculator: Understand the Cost of a Data Breach

Curious how a data breach would impact your organization? Find out with PKWARE’s data breach calculator, powered by data from IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report .

Data Breach Calculator

Calculate Your Risk

Data Type
Where is your data stored?

Results

Customer PII
Customer PII

Customer PII is the top target for attackers, accounting for 53% of stolen or compromised records and costing $160 per record. The frequent exploitation for identity theft and credit card fraud drives high costs. These breaches often result in regulatory penalties, reputational damage, and extended recovery times, averaging over 276 days to contain.

Employee PII
Employee PII

Employee PII is the second most targeted data type, making up 37% of stolen or compromised records and costing $168 per record. Breaches involving employee data cause significant disruption, with extended costs for credit monitoring, legal fees, and reputational damage. They also expose firms to regulatory fines under laws like GDPR and HIPAA and can lead to employee lawsuits and loss of trust.

Intellectual Property
Intellectual Property

Although less frequently compromised compared to other data types, Intellectual Property carries the highest cost at $178 per record. IP related breaches often result in operational disruption, loss of competitive advantage, regulatory exposure, and long-term reputational damage. Because IP is irreplaceable, its theft can severely impact innovation, market position, and investor confidence.

Anonymized Customer Data
Anonymized Customer Data (non PII)

Though less costly than other data types, anonymized customer data breaches still average $115 per record. These incidents can lead to business disruption, regulatory scrutiny, and loss of customer trust, especially since anonymized data can often be re-identified when combined with other sources.

Other Corporate Data
Other Corporate Data

Corporate data not classified as PII or IP accounts for 34% of breaches, with an average cost of $154 per record. These breaches often cause operational disruption, legal exposure, and reputational harm. Though not regulated like PII, leaked internal data-such as strategic plans or financial forecasts-can still undermine competitive advantage.

Financial Services
Financial Services

The Financial Services industry has the second highest average breach cost at $5.56 million. The industry surpassed healthcare in 2024 and remained the most breached in H1 2025, with 387 incidents. Key risks include legacy systems, human error, shadow/ AI data, and cloud vulnerabilities. For financial firms, breach costs extend beyond remediation. Delays in threat detection can trigger regulatory penalties that exceed initial expenses. For example, under GDPR, financial organizations could face fines of up to 2% of annual revenue or 4% for repeat offenses.

Government
Government

The average cost of a public sector data breach is $2.86 million, up 12% from last year. Government breaches take longer to detect (202 days vs. 181 globally) and contain (74 days vs 60), increasing costs and data loss. In H1 2025, 208 ransomware attacks hit government agencies globally-a 65% rise from H1 2024- driven by legacy systems, limited budgets, and high value data.

Healthcare
Healthcare

Healthcare has the highest average breach cost at $7.42 million, leading all industries for the 14th consecutive year. This is driven by the value of patient PII used in identity theft and fraud and strict regulations like HIPAA. Breaches in healthcare also take the longest to resolve, averaging 279 days, over five weeks longer than the global norm.

Manufacturing
Manufacturing

The average breach cost in manufacturing is $5.00 million, with the sector heavily targeted for ransomware and IP theft. Operational disruptions are especially damaging—unplanned downtime can cost up to $125,000 per hour. Breaches are rising due to legacy systems, complex supply chains, industrial IoT vulnerabilities, and a low tolerance for downtime. Breaches are rising due to legacy systems, complex supply chains, and industrial IoT vulnerabilities.

Retail
Retail

Retail companies face significant cybersecurity challenges due to the vast amount of customer data they handle, reliance on inventory and point-of-sale systems, and a workforce that often includes non-technical and seasonal employees. These factors heighten the risk of data breaches and make securing systems more complex.The average retail breach costs $3.54 million, with payment system breaches costing 2.2x more. PCI fines range from $50–$90 per affected cardholder, and up to $500,000 per severe breach, plus legal fees, lawsuits, brand damage, and potential loss of merchant privileges.

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Privacy

Your Results-Backed by Two Decades of Industry Insight

As you explore your custom breach results, keep in mind that the calculator is based on real-world data from IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report, not theoretical models. Now in its 20th year, IBM has gained insights from over 6,485 breaches and 34,652 interviews with technology, security, and business leaders.

Not Taking Proactive Steps to Protect Your Data Has Costly Consequences

$ 10.22 M

The average cost of a data breach in the U.S. in 2025, a 9% increase over last year, driven in part by higher regulatory fines and detection and escalation costs.

86%

The percentage of businesses that experienced a disruption due to a data breach.

1 in 3

Number of breaches that involved shadow data, making it harder to track and secure.  

Cost Breakdown After a Security Incident

As cyber attacks become increasingly sophisticated, the consequences grow more severe. The true cost of a data breach spans multiple categories—including direct expenses and hidden, unforeseen impacts—that together can significantly set a business back.

Detection and Escalation

Covers all activities to identify and respond to a breach, including investigations, audits, crisis management, and potential ransom or stolen fund losses.

Notification

Involves notifying affected individuals and regulators as required by regulations such as HIPAA, GDPR, and CCPA, with significant fines for delays or non-compliance.

Post Breach Response

Includes PR, support services for victims, credit monitoring services, legal and regulatory expenditures, and issuing replacements for compromised accounts.

Lost Business

Reflects revenue loss, customer churn, and reputational damage resulting from downtime and trust erosion.

The Enterprise Data Security Solution with Preemptive Protection

Data-Centric Security to Eliminate Exposure

Data-Centric Security to Eliminate Exposure

Security teams aim to stop breach-related costs before they start. With the PK Protect Platform, teams can proactively discover and secure sensitive data across the entire organization, no matter where it resides or moves. PK Protect ensures you know where all data resides and that protection stays with the data itself. Even in the event of a breach, data remains inaccessible to unauthorized users. PK Protect provides security at the source, eliminating exposure and addressing risk at its root.

Prevent Exposure Before it Happens

“PK Protect is a critical defense in our data protection strategy. By proactively redacting or encrypting legacy data in alignment with our retention policies, we ensure that even if a breach occurs, the information remains inaccessible and unusable to bad actors. It’s not only about compliance, but also about preventing exposure before it happens.”

-Director of Information Security, PK Protect Customer

Prevent Exposure Before it Happens

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FAQs

PK Protect reduces breach-related costs by securing sensitive data before a breach occurs. By discovering data across the enterprise and applying persistent encryption, masking, or redaction, PK Protect ensures that even if data is compromised, it remains unreadable and unusable. This minimizes exposure, reduces regulatory penalties, and lowers the cost of breach response and remediation.

PK Protect automatically discovers and classifies sensitive data across endpoints, servers, on-prem, cloud, databases, data lakes, ERPs, and even mainframe. This includes discovery of “shadow data” which is untracked or forgotten data that often escapes traditional security tools. Once data is discovered and classified, PK Protect applies policy-driven protection such as encryption, redaction, or masking to eliminate hidden risks.

Yes. PK Protect is designed to meet the requirements of major data protection regulations including PCI DSS, GLBA, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA, and FISMA. It offers automated policy enforcement, audit-ready reporting, and pre-built sensitive data types that can be customized to streamline compliance across all environments.

Unlike perimeter-based tools that focus on controlling access, PK Protect secures the data itself, wherever it resides or travels. This data-centric approach ensures persistent protection at rest, in transit, and in use. Even if perimeter defenses are bypassed, PK Protect keeps sensitive data secure and inaccessible to unauthorized users.

Recent high-profile breaches across industries highlight growing vulnerabilities:

  • Education: In one of the largest breaches in U.S. education history, PowerSchool suffered a data breach affecting 62.4 million student records and 9.5 million teacher records, exposing sensitive information including Social Security numbers, PII, and medical records.
  • Healthcare: DaVita Inc. experienced a ransomware attack that compromised 2.7 million records, including medical and insurance data, raising significant concerns around data privacy and security vulnerabilities of healthcare systems.
  • Financial Services: TransUnion was breached via a third-party vendor, resulting in the exposure of 4.4 million records, including social security numbers and dates of birth.
  • Insurance: Farmers Insurance reported a breach linked to Salesforce, impacting 1.1 million policyholders.

A growing number of breaches are linked to vulnerabilities in third-party platforms such as Salesforce and Drift, which are increasingly exploited as entry points. Social engineering tactics—especially voice phishing (vishing)—are being used more widely to bypass traditional security measures. Additionally, the healthcare and education sectors continue to be heavily targeted due to the volume and sensitivity of the data they manage.