Meeting Cost Calculator

What a meeting actually costs

Meetings feel free because nobody sends an invoice. The money is already spent on salaries, so an hour of eight people's attention shows up nowhere in the budget. That accounting quirk is why calendars fill up while every other line item gets scrutinised. Putting a price on the hour does not make meetings evil; it just moves them from the invisible column to the visible one, where they compete with everything else you could buy with the same money.

The arithmetic is deliberately simple. Divide the average salary by 2,080 working hours a year to get an hourly rate, multiply by 1.3 to cover the employer's real cost, multiply by the number of people in the room, then scale by the fraction of an hour the meeting runs. If your finance team publishes a fully loaded rate for internal chargebacks, type it straight into the hourly field and skip the salary step.

Worked example: the Tuesday sync

Eight people, average salary 90,000, one hour, every week. The hourly rate is 90,000 divided by 2,080, which is 43.27. Loaded at 1.3 that becomes 56.25 per person-hour. Eight people for a full hour costs 450, and the burn rate is 7.50 for every minute the call runs — roughly the price of a coffee every sixty seconds.

Now switch the recurrence to weekly. That same meeting is 450 x 52 = 23,400 a year, which is most of a junior hire, or a conference budget for the whole team, or a year of the software everyone keeps asking for. Nobody ever approved 23,400 for a status update; they approved one hour, once, in 2023, and the charge has been renewing quietly ever since.

Worked example: the daily standup

Six engineers on 110,000, fifteen minutes, every workday. Loaded rate is 68.75 per person-hour, so a quarter of an hour for six people is 103. Small enough to ignore — until you set the recurrence to every workday and get 103 x 250 = 25,780 a year. Short meetings are not automatically cheap. Frequency does the same damage as duration, and it does it where nobody is looking.

Why the burn rate changes behaviour

Total cost is an abstraction that arrives after the fact. A per-minute figure is a meter running in the room. Once a group knows the meeting is spending 7.50 a minute, the ten minutes of waiting for latecomers has a price, the tangent about the office move has a price, and the person reading their screen has a price. Teams that put the burn rate at the top of the agenda doc tend to start on time without anyone having to police it, because the cost of the delay stops being someone else's problem.

The comparison that lands hardest is person-hours. A one-hour meeting with eight people is not one hour, it is a full working day removed from the week. Framed that way, the question changes from "can everyone make Tuesday" to "is this worth a person-day", which is a question people can actually answer.

A 30-minute meeting audit

Export the last month of your team calendar and price every recurring block with this calculator. Sort by annual cost, not by how annoying each one feels. Then run three passes. First, the invite list: cost scales linearly with heads, so removing two optional attendees from a weekly hour of eight saves a quarter of the bill instantly, and those people can read the notes. Second, the default length: move company defaults from 30 and 60 minutes to 25 and 50, which removes about 17 percent of the total and gives people a gap to move between calls. Third, the review date: give every standing invite an expiry, so continuing it becomes a decision rather than the default.

When not to meet at all

Use a two-question test. Does this need a decision, and does the decision need live discussion to resolve disagreement? If the answer to the first is no, it is information: send a document, a recording or a dashboard link. If the answer to the first is yes but the second is no, write the proposal with a deadline for objections and default to approval. Only when there is genuine disagreement, sensitive feedback or fast creative back-and-forth does synchronous time earn its price — and then the small expensive meeting with the four people who actually decide beats the cheap-feeling large one.

Limitations worth stating out loud

This is a cost model, not a value model. It counts what goes in and says nothing about what comes out, so a 450 meeting that prevents a 50,000 mistake is a bargain the calculator cannot see. Salary averages hide wide spreads: one meeting with three directors and five graduates costs very different amounts depending on who talks. The 1.3 loading is a convention, not your company's number, and hourly employees, contractors and agencies are billed differently again. Finally, the real cost of an interruption includes the focus time lost around it — research on context switching suggests 15 to 20 minutes of recovery per interruption, which this tool does not attempt to price. Treat the output as the floor, not the ceiling.