See what a meeting actually costs: attendees multiplied by their hourly rate and the time it takes.
Making meetings worth their cost
A meeting's real price is the salary of everyone sitting in it. A one-hour meeting with eight people is a full working day of someone's time, and a recurring weekly meeting costs that same amount fifty times a year. Seeing the number usually changes the conversation about whether the meeting needs to exist.
Before booking, ask whether the meeting needs everyone invited, whether it could be half as long, and whether a written update would do the same job. Cutting the attendee list is usually the fastest saving, since cost scales directly with headcount.
A standing weekly hour with eight people costs 16,800 a year
Nobody approves a 16,800 line item without discussion, but a recurring meeting reaches that figure without anyone signing anything. The cost is invisible because it never appears on a budget — it is paid in salary that has already been committed.
How it works
- Multiplies attendees, duration and hourly cost to price a single meeting.
- Uses fully loaded cost rather than bare salary, which is where most estimates fall short.
- Annualises recurring meetings, since the yearly figure is what makes the decision obvious.
hourly = salary ÷ 2,080 fully loaded = hourly × 1.3 employer taxes, benefits, overhead per meeting = attendees × hours × fully loaded annual = per meeting × occurrences per year
Worked example
A weekly one-hour meeting with eight people on an average 70,000 salary, held 48 weeks a year.
- hourly: 70,000 ÷ 2,080 = 33.65
- fully loaded: 33.65 × 1.3 = 43.75
- per meeting: 8 × 1 × 43.75 = 350
- annual: 350 × 48 = 16,800
16,800 a year for one recurring hour. Halving it to thirty minutes saves 8,400; trimming attendance from eight to five saves 6,300 without shortening it at all.
Reading the result
- The load factor is the part most calculators omit. Employer taxes, benefits, equipment and overhead typically add 25–40% on top of salary, so pricing a meeting on bare salary understates it by around 23%.
- This counts only the hour itself. Preparation, the context switch either side, and the recovery time before deep work resumes are all real and all excluded — which makes 16,800 a floor rather than an estimate.
- The most effective lever is usually the attendee list, not the clock. Removing three people from a weekly hour saves more than most teams save by trimming a quarter-hour, and it costs the meeting nothing if those three were only there to stay informed.
- Some meetings are worth far more than they cost. The point of pricing them is not to eliminate them but to make the trade visible, so the ones that are pure habit can be recognised as such.
Common questions
- Isn't this cost already sunk? Everyone is salaried anyway.
- Their time is committed, not the use of it. The relevant question is what that hour would otherwise produce. Treating salaried time as free is exactly why recurring meetings accumulate without ever being reviewed.
- What is the quickest saving?
- Cutting the invitee list. Attendance and duration multiply equally in the formula, but people are usually easier to remove than minutes — and anyone attending purely to stay informed can be served by notes instead.