Complete Lost Property Service
Current lost property process cost calculator
Estimate the visible annual cost of your current in-house process using your own item volumes, handling time, staff cost, storage and administration figures.
This calculator does not estimate a CLPS fee or guarantee savings. It provides an indicative baseline for operational review; validate the assumptions with finance, HR, facilities and service owners.
Planning tool
Estimate your current annual cost
Default staff rate: £21 per hour, the CLPS fully loaded planning rate derived from the ORR October 2022 rail employment-cost review. ORR does not publish £21 as a literal hourly rate. View the official ORR report and replace the default with your validated rate where available.
The 20% interaction and 20% escalation rates are editable CLPS planning assumptions, not ContactBabel findings.
Default base cost: £6.17 per inbound call, reported in ContactBabel’s 2026 UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ Guide, based on surveys with 215 UK organisations. Adjust it for your own channels and costs.
To avoid double counting, exclude customer-service handling from staff minutes per item, or set the interaction rate to 0%. Otherwise use your organisation’s own validated allocation method.
Indicative annual baseline
- Items handled
- 3,000
- Staff hours
- 900
- Staff handling cost
- £18,900
- Storage cost
- £6,000
- Other administration
- £2,400
- Lost-property customer-service interactions
- 600
- Lost-property escalations
- 120
- Base customer-service cost
- £3,702
- Escalation cost uplift
- £740
- Total customer-service cost
- £4,442
- Estimated current annual cost
- £31,742
Indicative planning estimate only. This is not a quotation or guaranteed saving.
What to include
- Time spent receiving, recording, moving, storing, searching, answering enquiries, verifying claims, packing, returning and disposing of items
- Fully loaded staff cost, including relevant employment overheads rather than salary alone
- Secure space, cabinets, containers, systems, consumables, courier administration and disposal
- Supervision, training, audits, complaints, incidents and cover for multiple sites
Rail staff-cost assumption and source
The default £21 per hour is the CLPS fully loaded planning rate derived from the ORR October 2022 Review of rail industry employment costs, using the operational non-safety critical employment-cost category. ORR does not publish £21 as a literal hourly rate. Replace it with your organisation’s validated fully loaded rate whenever available.
The ORR report uses Network Rail data from April 2020 to March 2021 and train operator data for calendar year 2021. Treat the default as a transparent starting assumption rather than a current universal industry rate.
View the ORR Review of rail industry employment costs (October 2022)Customer-service assumptions and source
The calculator initially assumes that 20% of lost property items generate a customer-service interaction and that 20% of those interactions escalate. These are editable CLPS planning assumptions supplied for this calculator, not research findings.
An escalated interaction is modelled at either two or three times the total base interaction cost. The calculator adds only the extra uplift above the base cost, avoiding duplicate charges within the customer-service subtotal.
The default £6.17 base cost uses ContactBabel’s 2026 UK inbound-call benchmark. Digital contacts may cost less, so replace it with your organisation’s validated blended cost where possible.
View the ContactBabel 2026 UK Contact Centre Decision-Makers’ GuideInterpret the result
Use the estimated total as a starting point for understanding the visible annual cost of your current process. Avoid counting customer-service work again within staff minutes, add any material costs not represented and document confidence ranges.
Request a full TCO overview
The public calculator deliberately stops at your current-cost baseline. Register after completing it to request a fuller total-cost-of-ownership overview covering the proposed service boundary, retained activity, implementation considerations and potential operating model with CLPS.
Published and reviewed by Complete Lost Property Service on 12 August 2026.
A practical first step
Take lost property off your team’s workload
Book a short, no-obligation review of your current process with CLPS.