Meeting Cost Calculator

A room full of people costs money for every minute it sits there, but almost nobody puts a figure on it. This article explains how the meeting cost calculator turns salaries into an hourly cost, why the on-cost and the hours-per-year divisor matter more than people expect, how preparation and follow-up change the total, and what to do with the number once you have it.

The number nobody works out

Most organisations know what a piece of software costs, what a laptop costs, and what a contractor charges a day. Very few know what their Tuesday morning stand-up costs. The time is already paid for, so it feels free, and the invoice never arrives.

It is not free. Seven people in a room for an hour are seven hours of paid work that produced whatever the meeting produced and nothing else. Put a figure on it and two things usually happen. The guest list gets shorter, and the agenda gets tighter. Neither needs a policy or a campaign — the figure does the arguing.

This tool builds that figure from the only inputs you can realistically get hold of: roles, how many people are in each, and roughly what they are paid. It does not need anybody's actual salary. A row that says four engineers on 72,000 gives the same total as four separate rows, and it keeps individual pay off the screen, which matters when you are going to show the result to somebody.

Salary is not what an hour costs

The first thing that goes wrong in a back-of-an-envelope calculation is using pay as if it were cost. Someone on 60,000 a year does not cost their employer 60,000 a year. On top of that sit employer social security or national insurance, pension contributions, insurance, paid holiday cover, a laptop, a phone, software licences, training, recruitment costs and a share of the rent, the heating and the coffee.

The standard way to carry all of that is an on-cost: a percentage added to pay that stands in for everything else. The On-cost field in the Pay assumptions panel defaults to 30 per cent, which is a common in-house rule of thumb for taxes, pension and benefits alone. Organisations that want a meeting to carry a share of equipment and premises as well use higher figures, and 60 to 100 per cent is not unusual. Consultancies and agencies, who need every hour to cover the whole business, often work above that.

There is no universally correct figure, which is exactly why it is a field rather than a constant baked into the code. Your finance team almost certainly has one already, and using theirs makes the result something you can quote internally without an argument about method.

The other half of the sum: hours in a working year

The second assumption is the one people skip. To turn an annual salary into an hourly rate you have to divide by the hours actually worked in a year, and the obvious number is wrong.

Forty hours a week for fifty-two weeks gives 2,080. Nobody works 2,080 hours. Take out statutory annual leave, public holidays, a few sick days and the odd training day, and a full-time year in most of Europe lands somewhere between 1,650 and 1,850 hours. Countries with less statutory leave run higher, closer to 1,900. Part-time and shift patterns are different again.

The Working hours a year field defaults to 1,750 for that reason. The difference is not cosmetic: dividing a salary by 1,750 instead of 2,080 makes every hour about nineteen per cent more expensive. Combine that with an on-cost and you get the gap between the naive estimate people carry in their heads and what the hour actually costs. Someone on 72,000 feels like 35 an hour. At 1,750 hours with a 30 per cent on-cost they are 53.

If you would rather model a nominal contracted year, type 2,080 and the whole result recalculates as you type. Seeing the total move is itself a useful demonstration of how sensitive this kind of estimate is to an assumption most people never state.

The meeting is not only the meeting

A well-run meeting has a pack to read beforehand and notes to write afterwards. That work exists because the meeting exists. Leaving it out understates a serious meeting by a third or more, and it quietly flatters the meetings that generate the most work around themselves.

So there are two fields for it, both per person: Preparation each and Follow-up each, in minutes. Ten minutes of reading each way is the default, which is modest. A monthly steering group with a thirty-page pack and formal minutes might be forty-five minutes of preparation for everyone and an hour of write-up for one person. The tool applies the figure to every attendee, so where only the chair does the write-up, put the chair's time in and accept that the follow-up line is an average rather than a schedule.

There is a useful diagnostic hiding here. If the preparation and follow-up cost more than the meeting itself, the meeting is not really a meeting. It is a document with a discussion attached, and that is often a sign the discussion could be replaced by comments on the document.

A worked example, line by line

The page opens with a weekly product sync: a product manager on 78,000, four engineers on 72,000, a designer on 65,000, and a head of department billed at an hourly rate of 85. One hour in the room, ten minutes of preparation and ten minutes of follow-up each, an on-cost of 30 per cent and 1,750 working hours a year.

The product manager's salary divides to 44.57 an hour, and the on-cost takes that to 57.94. Each engineer works out at 53.49, so the four together are 213.94. The designer comes to 48.29. The head of department was entered as an hourly rate, so no division happens — the on-cost simply takes 85 to 110.50. Add them up and the room burns 430.67 an hour, which is 7.18 a minute.

The hour itself therefore costs 430.67. Ten minutes of preparation for seven people is another 71.78, and the follow-up is the same again. The total is 574.23, or roughly 82 a head. Run it every week for forty-six working weeks and it is 26,415 a year — the salary of another designer, spent on a recurring hour.

None of those figures are estimates in the loose sense. They are arithmetic on the numbers you typed, and every step of it is visible in the breakdown table underneath the headline, including each role's share of the total. In this example the four engineers are half the cost and the single head of department is a quarter, which is the kind of thing that changes who gets invited.

The live meter

Underneath the summary there is a meter that counts up in money while the meeting runs. Press Start as the meeting begins and it ticks over at the room rate — 7.18 a minute in the example above — showing what has been spent so far and how long it has been going.

Once you pass the scheduled length, the tone changes: the meter tells you how far over you are and what the overrun alone has cost. That is the most persuasive part. A meeting that runs twenty minutes long is not twenty minutes of inconvenience, it is a second, unbudgeted purchase nobody approved.

The clock is read from your device on every tick rather than counted up a second at a time. That sounds like a technicality until you switch tabs. Browsers throttle background timers to save battery, so a meter built by adding one every second loses minutes without telling you. Reading the wall clock means the number is right whether the tab was in front the whole time or the laptop was asleep.

If you close the page mid-meeting, the elapsed time is remembered but the meter comes back paused rather than still running. A tab left open overnight would otherwise add ten hours to the bill, and a wrong number is worse than no number.

Three alternatives, one change each

A cost on its own only tells you the meeting is expensive. What you usually want to know is what the cheaper version would be, so the tool works out three of them and shows the saving beside each.

The first is the same meeting, shorter. Set the length you think it could run in — thirty minutes by default — and everything else stays fixed, so the saving is purely the time in the room. Preparation and follow-up are unchanged, because shortening a meeting does not shorten the pack.

The second drops the most expensive seats. Say how many people could be sent the notes instead and the tool removes the dearest ones first, since that is where the money is. In the worked example, dropping the two priciest seats saves slightly more than halving the length, which is not the answer most people expect.

The third replaces the meeting with a written update. One person spends the writing time you set at the highest rate in the room, on the assumption that whoever would have chaired it writes it, and everyone else spends the reading time. Twenty minutes of writing and four minutes of reading each turns a 574 meeting into a 66 email. That comparison is not an argument for abolishing meetings — plenty of things genuinely need the room — but it puts a price on the ones that are only a status report.

Recurring meetings and the yearly figure

One meeting rarely justifies a conversation. A standing invitation does, because it outlives whatever prompted it. The How often control extrapolates the total to a year: one-off, every working day, weekly, fortnightly, monthly or quarterly.

Weekly and daily are worked out from the Working weeks a year field rather than a flat 52, which defaults to 46 to allow for leave and end-of-year shutdowns. Fortnightly is half of that, monthly is twelve and quarterly is four. If your organisation counts differently, change the weeks figure and the yearly total follows.

The yearly number is the one that moves people. An hour that costs a few hundred is easy to wave away; the same hour restated as tens of thousands a year, sitting beside what else that money buys, is much harder to ignore. It is also the fairest way to compare two meetings of different frequencies — a costly monthly review can be cheaper over a year than a cheap-looking daily huddle.

What the figure does not tell you

This is a cost, not a verdict. A meeting that settles a decision three weeks earlier can be worth many times its price, and there is no way for a calculator to know which meetings those are. Used carelessly, a cost-per-meeting number becomes a stick for beating up the people who organise them, and the usual result is that the meeting happens anyway with worse preparation.

The productive questions the figure supports are narrower and more useful. Does this need to be an hour, or would forty minutes do? Does everyone on the invitation have something to say, or are some of them there in case? Is this the sort of thing a written update covers? Has anybody looked at this standing meeting since the project that created it finished?

There are things the arithmetic genuinely cannot see, either. Context switching costs more than the meeting: an hour in the middle of an afternoon can cost the rest of the afternoon. Nor does it capture the value of people who never speak but need to hear the discussion, or the cost of the decision that does not get made because the meeting was cancelled. Treat the figure as one input among several.

It is also an internal cost, not a price. If you want a billable number, put your charge-out rate in as an hourly rate and set the on-cost to zero, because a charge-out rate already includes overheads and margin.

Formats, exports and where the numbers live

Money is shown in whichever currency you pick, using the conventions of that currency — there is no conversion involved, so choose the one the salaries are actually in. Dates on the printed and copied summary have their own control, offering 22 August 2026, August 22, 2026, the two numeric orders, and the ISO form, because a document that travels between countries should not leave 08/09 open to interpretation.

There are four ways to take the result away. Print this summary sends just the figures to the printer — the header, the option panels, the buttons and the help text are all left out, and the meeting name and date sit at the top so the sheet identifies itself. Copy the summary puts a plain-text version on your clipboard for a message or a ticket. Download .csv gives you the per-role breakdown, the item-by-item costs and the alternatives as spreadsheet rows. The save bar under the result offers the same figures as a formatted text file or an image.

Everything stays on your device. The attendee rows and every setting are remembered in this browser so you can come back to a half-built list, and nothing is uploaded, because salary information is confidential in most organisations and has no business travelling across a network to work out an hourly rate. Start over clears what is stored and puts the example back, which is also the quickest way to get a clean slate before entering a real meeting.