The average 100-person organisation spends £91,600 per year on SaaS. Of that, £28,400 is wasted on licences nobody uses.
That number comes from multiple independent studies of enterprise SaaS usage, consistently showing 28-35% of licences going unused. It is not an edge case or a startup problem. It affects organisations of every size, in every sector, with every level of IT sophistication.
Why does it keep happening?
The structural problem is that SaaS billing and SaaS usage are tracked separately. Your finance team sees the invoices. Your IT team (sometimes) sees the users. Nobody is routinely cross-referencing the two.
When an employee leaves, the HR process removes their laptop and email access. It almost never removes their SaaS licences. When a tool gets replaced, the old subscription usually keeps running for months — sometimes indefinitely — because nobody is responsible for cancelling it.
When a team downsizes from 20 to 12 people, the 20-seat SaaS contract renews automatically at 20 seats because nobody renegotiated.
The hidden cost of partial utilisation
The £28,400 figure counts only licences with zero active usage. The real problem is larger.
Consider a 50-seat project management tool where 30 people log in regularly and 20 log in rarely or never. By the standard metric, only the 20 completely inactive licences are "wasted." But the 30 who log in rarely are also questionable — and the tool is at 60% utilisation, meaning 40% of its cost is producing minimal value.
When you measure utilisation rate rather than binary active/inactive, the recoverable figure for most organisations is closer to 50% of SaaS spend.
The top five sources of SaaS licence waste
**Employee churn.** The most common source. An employee leaves. Their 8-12 SaaS licences are not cancelled. At £50/month per licence average, a single departed employee costs £600/month in unreclaimed licences.
**Seasonal fluctuation.** Organisations hire for busy periods and scale down. SaaS contracts do not flex down automatically. The overhang persists until the next renewal.
**Departmental procurement.** Different teams buy the same tool independently, or buy overlapping tools with no visibility into what the organisation already has. This is increasingly common as SaaS buying has moved from IT to business units.
**Free tier to paid conversion.** A team starts with the free version of a tool, upgrades to paid, scales up the seats for a project, and never scales back down.
**Forgotten subscriptions.** Tools purchased for specific projects, trials that converted to paid, integrations nobody remembers setting up. These accumulate over years and are rarely audited.
How to find the waste in your estate
The only reliable method is automated cross-referencing of spend data against usage data.
Spend data comes from your finance system — Xero, QuickBooks, or a bank export. Every SaaS transaction, recurring and one-off, classified by vendor.
Usage data comes from your identity provider — Azure AD or Okta. Who has access to what, and when they last used it. This is the signal that matters: not whether an account exists, but whether anyone is actually logging in.
The gap between the two is your recoverable waste. At the organisation level, it is typically £28,000-£55,000 per 100 employees. At the individual tool level, it varies widely — Microsoft 365 unused seats are often the single largest item, followed by Salesforce, project management tools, and security software.
The organisations that recover this budget are not doing anything heroic. They are simply making visible what was always there.
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