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What does a rebrand actually cost
in admin time?
The new brand launches and everyone celebrates - until someone realises every template, policy and proposal still wears the old logo. Nobody budgeted for that. Put your own numbers in below and see what updating them all by hand really costs.
The line item nobody budgets for
You know the moment. The new brand lands - new logo, new colours, real excitement. The website flips over in a day and the email signatures update themselves. Then it arrives: the org-wide groan as everyone realises someone has to update every document.
Policies, procedures, training packs, proposals, forms. Hundreds of Word files and PDFs, every one of them wearing the old colours, the old fonts, the old logo on the header of every page. The job never gets a budget line because "it's just find-and-replace" - and then it quietly consumes weeks of somebody's working life.
The calculator below puts a number on that. It is deliberately one-sided: it measures the cost of doing it manually, nothing else. Enter your document count, roughly how long each one takes by hand, and the rate of the person doing it. That is the size of the problem.
Rebrand ROI calculator
Free. No sign-up. Runs entirely in your browser.
The cost of doing it by hand
Defaults to 15 minutes - a conservative blended average. A plain memo is quicker; a policy pack with headers, footers, tables and a logo on every page runs to hours. Change it to match your library.
Working week of 38 hours. Salary conversions use 220 working days/year at 7.6 hrs/day. On-costs, when applied, add 12% super.
The cost of doing nothing
That’s 3.6 weeks and $6,188 of admin time - before anyone touches their actual job.
550 documents at 15 minutes each, charged at $45/hr. And it is displacement work - not the job anyone was hired to do.
137.5
total hours of admin
3.6
working weeks (38-hr week)
$6,188
salary cost of that time
The breakdown
| Measure | Value |
|---|---|
| Documents to rebrand | 550 |
| Minutes per document | 15 |
| Total hours of admin time | 137.5 |
| Working days (7.6-hr day) | 18.1 |
| Working weeks (38-hr week) | 3.6 |
| Hourly rate used | $45 |
| Total salary cost of admin time | $6,188 |
This is the cost of the manual approach only - the size of the problem, not the price of any fix. It counts admin time alone: it does not include rework from the old brand slipping through, version-control mistakes, or the opportunity cost of the actual work that stalls while this runs. Figures are estimates for planning, based on the assumptions you entered.
That is what the manual version costs. There is a faster way.
See how automated rebranding compares →How we calculated this
Every assumption is on the table, and every one is yours to change.
There is no magic in the maths, and that is the point. The calculator runs four plain steps:
- Total hours = documents × minutes per document ÷ 60.
- Working weeks = total hours ÷ a 38-hour week, the Australian full-time standard.
- Hourly rate = the rate you enter, or an annual salary converted over 220 working days at 7.6 hours a day - the same basis as our Salary Converter.
- Total cost = total hours × that hourly rate, optionally grossed up by 12% super if you tick the on-costs box.
The one assumption worth arguing about
The defaults mirror a real corporate library: 550 documents at a blended 15 minutes each - which lands squarely in the two-to-four-weeks-of-admin range that manual rebrands actually take. 550 isn't a big number for an organisation: our verified test batch was one corporate policy suite alone, before you count GRC, L&D, HR, comms, marketing templates and every form the org owns. Both numbers are yours to override.
When we ran that real 550-template batch, the fiddly documents were closer to two hours each by hand - if your library skews that way, put a bigger number in. For reference, the same 550-document batch completed in 11 minutes through an automated pass. We would rather you argue the assumption than take ours on faith - the honest version of this tool is the one you can adjust. The full story of that run is in how we rebranded 550 documents in 11 minutes.
These figures are planning estimates, not a quote. They count admin time only - not rework, version errors, or the opportunity cost of the real work that stalls while a rebrand runs. Last reviewed 14 July 2026.
Quick answers
How do you calculate the cost of rebranding documents by hand?
Multiply the number of documents by the average minutes each one takes to update by hand, divide by 60 for total hours, then divide by a 38-hour week for working weeks and multiply the hours by an hourly rate for the salary cost. The calculator does all of this instantly and lets you change every assumption.
What is a realistic time per document?
It depends on the document. A plain memo might take a couple of minutes; a policy pack with headers, footers, tables and a logo on every page can run to hours once you include checking every version. The calculator defaults to a blended average of 15 minutes across a realistic mixed library, and you can override it to match your own.
Does this calculator include the cost of the software?
No. It measures one thing only - the cost of the manual approach, the size of the problem. It does not factor in the price of any tool. The numbers it produces are your own inputs, worked through openly so you can size the admin burden before deciding what to do about it.
Is my data stored or sent anywhere?
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server and nothing is stored. You can export a PDF or Excel copy for your own records, but that file is generated on your device.
What counts as a document for this?
Any file that carries your brand and has to be updated when the brand changes - Word templates, PDFs, policies, procedures, proposals, training packs, forms. If it has the old logo, the old colours or the old fonts on it, it counts.
You have seen the cost. Now see the alternative.
The calculator measures the manual grind. BrandSwitch is what happens when you stop doing it by hand - batch document rebranding, every page, in minutes.
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