How many hours of review does your content need, and how many do you have?
Move the sliders to match your team. The result updates as you go. Nothing you enter is stored or sent anywhere.
Three ways to close it:
Copy this result to cite it, or to drop into Slack or an email:
The calculator compares two numbers: the hours a proper review of your monthly output would take, and the hours your team has to do it. Everything else on the page is derived from the difference. There are no hidden multipliers, and every assumption that matters is on show and editable.
| Assumption | Default | Why, and what to do with it |
|---|---|---|
| Pieces from outside marketing | 8 | Your input. Sales decks, product emails, founder posts and help articles go out under the company's name too. Counting only marketing's output undercounts what needs checking. |
| Minutes per proper review | 45 | A read against the brief, a check of claims and figures, a tightening edit and a second look. A starting point, not a benchmark. A social post takes a fraction of this and a whitepaper takes far longer, so use the presets or set your own. |
| Protected review hours per week | 2 | Your input. Count only time you can genuinely protect for reviewing other people's work. Time spent writing doesn't count, and neither does time you'd like to have. |
| Weeks per month | 4.33 | 52 weeks divided by 12 months. |
| Full-time editor | 162 hrs a month | A 37.5-hour week multiplied by 4.33. Used only to express the gap as a fraction of a role. |
| Hourly cost | £45 | A placeholder for the blended cost of senior editorial time. Replace it with your own figure. It changes the £ number and nothing else. |
| Who reviews, backup reviewer | Not set | These two answers don't change any number. They change the notes you get. The leave figure uses 5.6 weeks, the UK statutory minimum for paid annual leave, and ignores sickness. |
| AI-drafted share | Some | Used only to estimate how many unreviewed pieces started as an AI draft, assuming AI use is spread evenly across your content. It doesn't change the gap. |
In a company of 50 to 250 people, the marketing team is rarely the only team publishing. Sales, product and the founders all put words out under the company's name, and those pieces often skip the review a marketing piece would get. Only time spent by someone other than the author counts as review, because checking your own work isn't independent. And a review process that depends on one person has a hole in it for every week that person is out. The team presets are illustrative starting points, not a published benchmark. Replace them with your own numbers.
The hours are there. The question now is whether they go on the right pieces.
Most pieces get a proper check. The rest depend on nobody having a bad week.
A large share of what you publish goes out without a proper check, and which pieces get one is probably decided by who is busiest.
Most of what you publish goes out without a proper check. That is less a review process than a hope.
Review time is rising, not falling, as AI use spreads. A 2026 Tech.co survey of 300 small and medium business owners and executives found that about 26% of the time AI saves goes on reviewing, editing or fact-checking its output, roughly 16 minutes for every hour of AI use. That covers all AI use in small businesses, not editorial work specifically, so this calculator doesn't use it as an input. It's here because it explains why the review hours you budgeted last year may not stretch as far this year.
An hour of tired skimming counts the same as an hour of proper editing. The calculator measures capacity, not skill.
A gap in review hours is worse if it falls on a pricing page than on an internal update. The tool can't see that. You can.
Reputational damage, lost deals and legal exposure are real but unmeasurable here. The £ figure is the value of the missing time, not the cost of an error.
It's the assumption most worth challenging. Change it and watch how sensitive the result is.
Built by Mike Sharkey, a B2B copywriter and editorial consultant who has spent fifteen years writing and reviewing for organisations including Meta and Google Cloud, where nothing went out unchecked. It's offered free, with no login and no data collection, as a way for marketing teams to put a number on something they usually only feel: that they're publishing faster than they can check.
So, is there a gap? Here's what closing it can look like for a growing B2B team.
Learn more →A content review gap is the difference between the editorial hours a team's content volume needs for a proper review and the hours it has. If a proper review of 60 pieces a month takes 45 hours and the team has 26, the gap is 19 hours a month.
Pieces published per month, inside and outside marketing, multiplied by the minutes a proper review takes gives the hours needed. Protected review hours per week multiplied by 4.33 gives the hours available. The difference is the gap. The share of pieces without a proper check is the proportion of output the available hours cannot cover, and the full-time editor equivalent is the gap divided by 162 hours, a 37.5-hour week multiplied by 4.33.
No. The calculation runs in your browser. Nothing you enter is sent or stored, and there is no email gate.
It is a placeholder, not a benchmark. A proper review means reading against the brief, checking claims and figures, tightening the edit and taking a second look, and 45 minutes is a reasonable middle for mixed content. Short-form takes less and long-form takes far more, so change it to match your own content and see how sensitive the result is.
Sales decks, product emails, founder posts and help articles go out under the company's name too. In a company of 100 to 200 people a lot of customer-facing content comes from outside the marketing team, and it often skips the review a marketing piece would get. Leaving it out would understate what needs checking.
Those two answers do not change any of the numbers. They change the notes you get, because a review is only as independent and as dependable as the person doing it. Checking your own work is not independent review, and a process that depends on one person has no cover for the weeks that person is away.
For most mid-sized marketing teams the gap works out as a fraction of a full-time role, which is why fractional editorial support is more common than a hire. If you are weighing a hire anyway, the true cost of hiring calculator shows what one would cost.