Free Tool
What Are Your Meetings Really Costing You?
Salary plus overhead, calculated in seconds. Enter your team size and find out what that weekly standup actually runs you per year.
I spent 20 years running teams at companies like Emirates and Virgin. In every single role, meetings were the number-one killer of productive time. Not bad intentions. Not poor strategy. Meetings.
The problem was never that people didn’t want to work. The problem was that nobody had ever added up the bill. A one-hour weekly standup with six people feels harmless. Run the numbers, and you’re looking at over $13,000 a year. That’s a hiring budget. That’s a software stack. That’s real money disappearing into a calendar event with no agenda.
In my analytics ROI guide, I write about the value of simplifying before you solve. That applies here too. Before you redesign your meeting culture, you need to see the actual number. This calculator shows you that number, with full salary and overhead factored in, in under a minute.
💸 What’s that meeting really costing you?
Salary + overhead, calculated in seconds.
Meetings
This meeting costs
$0per meeting
If this repeats…
Monthly$0
Per year$0
All recurring meetings · per year
$0
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Calculations in USD. Hourly cost = annual salary ÷ 2,080 hrs × 1.4 (salary + overhead).
Yearly cost of a weekly 1-hour meeting with 6 people at $65K avg. salary
31
Hours per month the average knowledge worker spends in meetings
40%
Overhead multiplier applied on top of salary in this calculator
50%
Of meetings workers say could be replaced by email or async updates
How This Meeting Cost Calculator Works
A lot of meeting cost calculators only count salary. That undercounts the real number by a significant margin. The true cost of a person’s time includes the benefits they receive, the desk they sit at, the software they use, and the employer taxes the company pays. That overhead typically adds another 30 to 40 percent on top of base salary.
This calculator uses a 40% overhead multiplier, which is a conservative but honest figure for most knowledge-work roles. You can see the full formula below.
The Formula
Step 1: Annual salary ÷ 2,080 hours = base hourly rate
Step 2: Base hourly rate × 1.4 = fully-loaded hourly cost
Step 3: Fully-loaded hourly cost × meeting duration (hours) × number of attendees = cost per meeting
Step 4: Cost per meeting × frequency = annual cost
For a team of six people earning an average of $65,000 a year, the fully-loaded hourly cost per person works out to about $44. A one-hour meeting costs roughly $263. Run it weekly, and you reach $13,650 a year before you have done anything else with that calendar slot.
Add a second meeting. Then a third. In organizations where professionals attend 31 hours of meetings per month, as research from the Harvard Business Review and MIT consistently shows, the total figure becomes a significant line item. One that most budget reviews never examine.
What You Do With That Number
Knowing the cost is only the first step. The calculator gives you the number. What you do next depends on what the meetings are actually for.
Some meetings earn their cost. A well-run decision meeting with the right people in the room can save weeks of back-and-forth and avoid costly mistakes. The real question isn’t whether you spend money on meetings — it’s whether you get a return on what you spend.
In the 4 Productivity Vectors framework, Meetings sit inside the Efficiency vector, alongside Time Management, Email, and Delegation. Efficiency is about output per unit of input. A meeting is efficient when the combined cost of time is lower than the value of what the meeting produces. That bar is higher than people think.
Once you have the annual cost in front of you, three questions become worth asking. First, could this meeting happen less often? Switching from weekly to biweekly cuts the annual bill in half immediately. Second, could this meeting be shorter? A 30-minute version of the same meeting costs half as much. Third, could this meeting be an email? For status updates, progress reports, and information-sharing, async communication is almost always faster and cheaper for everyone involved.
Three Steps to Cut Your Meeting Bill Without Losing Alignment
1
Run the calculator for every recurring meeting in your calendar
Do not just calculate your most expensive meetings. Calculate all of them. The damage is usually spread across a dozen meetings that each feel “not that big a deal.” Total them up. The aggregate number is the one worth acting on.
2
Share the number with your team to start a conversation
Teams rarely push back on meetings they feel they need. But when they see the number in dollars, the conversation changes. “This standup costs us $7,800 a year. Is that worth it?” is a question people can actually answer together.
3
Test one change per meeting before canceling anything
Canceling meetings cold creates coordination problems. Instead, test a smaller version. Cut a one-hour meeting to 45 minutes for a month. See if anything breaks. If nothing does, cut it further. The data will tell you where the floor is.
Meeting Cost Calculator: Common Questions
How do you calculate the cost of a meeting?
Multiply the number of attendees by the meeting duration in hours, then multiply by the fully-loaded hourly cost per person. Fully-loaded means salary plus overhead: benefits, employer taxes, office space, and tools. A good overhead multiplier for most knowledge-work roles is 1.4 times base hourly rate. This calculator applies that automatically.
Why does overhead matter in a meeting cost calculation?
Salary is what shows up on a payslip, but it’s not what an employee actually costs the company. Benefits packages, national insurance or employer taxes, equipment, software licenses, and office occupancy costs typically add 30 to 40 percent on top of base salary. Leaving that out gives you a number that’s far too low.
How much does an average one-hour meeting cost?
For a team of six people earning $65,000 a year on average, a one-hour meeting costs approximately $263. That same meeting running every week for 52 weeks costs $13,650. For senior leadership teams with higher average salaries, the figure is proportionally larger.
What is the fully-loaded hourly cost of an employee?
Divide annual salary by 2,080 working hours to get the base hourly rate, then multiply by 1.4 to include overhead. A person earning $65,000 a year costs roughly $44 per hour all-in. That is the number that belongs in any honest meeting cost calculation.
Can I add multiple meetings to this calculator?
Yes. The calculator includes an option to add more meetings so you can compare costs side by side and see the combined annual impact of your full recurring meeting schedule.
Should I include the meeting organizer’s time in the cost?
The calculator accounts for all attendees. If the meeting organizer is also an attendee, their time is already included. Preparation time on top of meeting time is a separate cost, and one worth tracking separately if you want a full picture.
Santiago Tacoronte is a productivity coach and former corporate executive with 20+ years leading teams at Emirates and Virgin. He teaches 30,000+ professionals through his online courses and the 4 Productivity Vectors framework. Follow his thinking on meetings, focus, and workplace performance at the newsletter.
Related Resources
If the calculator revealed a number worth acting on, these will help you build a plan around it. The Productivity Hub has a full section on the Efficiency vector and what the research says about meeting reduction. The Productivity Assessment will show you which of the four vectors is the biggest drag on your team’s output right now. And if you want to go deeper on the meetings and email relationship, start with the diagnostic.
The Number Was Probably Higher Than You Expected
That is the point. Get the one-page shareable report and bring it to your next team conversation.