0 an extra amount of something, such as time or money, that you allow because there might be a mistake in your calculations:
2 the fact that it is possible to make some mistakes without having a very damaging effect on the final result:
With the company's current precarious situation there is no margin of error.
Though they concede that most minimum standards are overly conservative, they insist that this comfortable margin of error ensures that false identification will never occur.
Few of us would fly an airplane in possibly dangerous weather conditions if we did not know the margin of error.
The survey targeted answers to its questions to be 95% accurate, with a 10% margin of error.
Estimation of membership data is subject to a margin of error.
There is no case in the real world where each candidate's votes can be predicted without any margin of error before elections.
This number is too high to be ignored if we assume a standard 5% margin of error.
As the true cost of items increases, the acceptable percent margin of error makes the absolute dollar margin of error quite large.
Thus, minority party leaders realized that the majority party typically had a very slim margin of error.
