A method and structure for calculating transaction costs as a function of one or more services provided by a computer system. Each user/computer transaction utilizes one or more computer system services to execute the transaction. Each computer system service provided by an IT department incurs a cost in terms of the equipment, software, personnel and facilities utilized to provide distinct levels of availability and response time. By identifying one or more IT services utilized to execute a transaction and by calculating the actual cost incurred to provide one or more of the services, a transaction cost is calculated by summing up the service costs. Thus, the transaction cost is a function of the service costs of the one or more services utilized to execute the transaction.