Meeting cost calculator
What does one recurring meeting cost over a year, and what would changing its cadence save?
Salary plus benefits and overhead, not salary alone.
46 allows for leave and public holidays.
Cost per year
$34,960
8 attendees × 60 min × 46 occurrences at $95 loaded hourly cost.
- Per occurrence
- $760
- Attendee hours per year
- 368 h
And if we changed it?
As entered
$34,960
Baseline
Every figure beside this one is measured against it.
Half the cadence
$—
A written update in the off week.
Half the length
$—
Same cadence, agenda cut to decisions only.
Three fewer attendees
$—
Notes circulated instead of attendance.
The alternatives are computed from the numbers above. With JavaScript off the arithmetic is in How this is calculated: halving the cadence or the length halves the total, and each attendee removed takes their share of it with them.
Loaded hourly cost means salary plus benefits and overhead. The figure excludes preparation, follow-up and the cost of interrupting focused work, all of which make the real number higher.
How this is calculated
One multiplication, stated in full so you can check it against your own spreadsheet rather than trusting the box above.
attendees × (minutes ÷ 60) × loaded hourly cost × occurrences per year
Attendee hours are reported separately because they are the figure a manager can act on. A cost can be argued away as sunk; four hundred hours cannot.
What it assumes
That everyone invited attends, for the whole meeting, and that their time has one price. All three are wrong in detail and close enough in aggregate: a half-attending director and a fully-attending engineer roughly cancel out.
That the default $95 loaded hourly cost is a placeholder and nothing more. It is not a benchmark, it is not sourced from a salary survey, and the tool does not pretend otherwise — replace it with your own organisation’s figure before quoting any number from this page.
What it deliberately does not model
Preparation and follow-up, context switching either side of the meeting, the value of the decisions the meeting produces, and the cost of the meeting not happening. The first two make the real cost higher; the second two are the reason a high number is not automatically an argument for cancelling.
Note
Read the number as a floor. Every omission above pushes the true figure up, so treat the output as the cheapest this meeting could possibly be.