A meeting costs attendees times duration times the average hourly rate. Six people for an hour on an average salary of 65,000 costs about 212 — and the same meeting held weekly costs nearly 9,800 a year. The single meeting always looks affordable; the annual figure is the one that changes behaviour.
That gap is the entire argument for calculating it at all. Nobody cancels a 212 meeting and plenty of people would reconsider a 9,800 line item.
What should the hourly rate be?
Salary divided by working hours is the floor, and it understates the real cost substantially. A fully loaded figure adds employer taxes, pension, equipment, software and the share of premises and management overhead each person carries.
The usual multiplier is somewhere between 1.25 and 1.4 on salary, and it varies enormously by country and sector. Using bare salary produces a number that is defensible, conservative and roughly a third too low.
For an agency or a consultancy the calculation is different again, because the relevant figure is the billable rate rather than the cost — an hour spent in an internal meeting is an hour that could have been sold.
What does the annual figure look like?
Recurring meetings are where the cost accumulates, and the arithmetic is unforgiving.
| Meeting | Cost per instance | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| 6 people, 1 hour, weekly | ~212 | ~9,800 |
| 10 people, 1 hour, weekly | ~353 | ~16,300 |
| 6 people, 30 min, daily | ~106 | ~24,400 |
| 20 people, 1 hour, monthly | ~706 | ~8,500 |
The daily standup row is the one that surprises people. Half an hour looks trivial and five of them a week is more expensive than the weekly hour-long meeting everyone complains about.
Recurring meetings deserve a review date for the same reason. A meeting created to solve a specific problem outlives the problem by default, because cancelling it requires someone to decide and continuing it requires nobody to do anything.
What is the useful comparison?
Against something concrete rather than against a budget line. A weekly hour-long meeting for six people costs roughly what a junior hire costs for a month, or what a mid-sized software subscription costs for a year.
That framing works because it converts an abstract number into a trade. Nobody has an intuition for 9,800 of meeting time and everyone has an intuition for whether a recurring meeting is worth more than a month of an extra person.
The other useful comparison is against the decision the meeting exists to make. A weekly meeting that produces one decision a month is costing roughly 820 per decision, which is a reasonable price for a significant one and an absurd one for a status update that could have been written down.
What does the calculation not capture?
Three things, and they run in both directions.
- Context switching. The cost of a meeting includes the fragmented time either side of it, which is often larger than the meeting.
- The value produced. A decision made in an hour that would have taken a week of email is cheap at 212.
- Attendance choice. The marginal attendee who does not speak is the cheapest person to remove and usually the last one considered.
The point of the number is not to abolish meetings. It is to make the size of the recurring ones visible, so that the decision to hold them is a decision rather than a default.
Who should actually be in the room?
The people who will decide, the people who hold information the decision needs, and nobody else. Every additional attendee adds cost linearly and adds value at a rate that falls off quickly past about five or six people.
The cheapest single change to a recurring meeting is usually to shorten the invite list rather than the duration. Removing four people from a weekly hour-long meeting saves about 6,500 a year and typically makes the meeting better rather than worse, because a smaller group reaches a decision faster.
Questions people ask
Should travel time count? For an in-person meeting, yes, and it frequently doubles the figure. An hour-long meeting that costs six people forty minutes of travel each is a two-hour meeting in cost terms.
Should I include my own time? Yes. Leaving the organiser out of the count is the most common way the figure comes out low.
What about asynchronous alternatives? They are cheaper in salary terms and not free — a written update takes time to write and to read. The comparison is worth doing rather than assuming.
Does a shorter meeting cost proportionally less? In salary terms, yes. In practice a 25-minute meeting often achieves what a 60-minute one does, because the time available shapes the discussion more than the agenda does.
Is this figure defensible in a business case? As a floor, yes, provided you state whether it uses bare salary or a loaded rate. Stating the assumption is what makes it a measurement rather than a rhetorical device.
Does the calculation work for a workshop? The arithmetic does, and the framing changes: a full-day workshop for eight people is a genuinely large number, and it should be, because it is displacing a day of everything else those eight people would have done.
Work out the annual figure rather than the hourly one, and compare it against something real. The meeting cost calculator takes attendees, duration and rate and reports both, and the break-even calculator is next door for the fixed costs it belongs to.