Meeting Cost Calculator
Enter who is in the room by salary band, how long the meeting runs, and the overhead multiplier that turns a salary into what the employer actually pays. You get the cost of this meeting, the cost of every minute it runs over, the person-hours it consumes, and — if it repeats — what the series costs over a year. The annual figure is usually the one that changes behaviour.
Who is in the room
Add a row per salary band. Everyone in a row is counted at the same salary.
The meeting
Scheduled length, including the overrun.
1.25–1.4 covers benefits, taxes, and equipment.
2,080 is a 40-hour week for 52 weeks.
Weekly is about 48 after holidays.
What it costs
This meeting
$510.82
7 people × 60 min
Per minute
$8.51
every minute it runs over
Per year
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Add times per year
This is the cost of the time in the room, not the value of the meeting. Plenty of expensive meetings are worth every dollar, and the useful comparison is against what the same hours would have produced elsewhere.
Replace the meeting with something people can read
Turn the update into a designed one-pager or deck on a Moda canvas.
Try Moda free →Salary is not what an employee costs
The hourly figure people reach for — salary divided by 2,080 — undercounts what an employer actually pays for an hour of someone’s time. Payroll taxes, health and retirement benefits, equipment, software licences, and office space all sit on top, and the usual loaded multiplier lands somewhere between 1.25 and 1.4 for salaried staff. The multiplier is editable here because the right figure depends entirely on your benefits and location, and setting it to 1 gives the salary-only version if that is the comparison you want. Whichever you choose, the multiplier is applied identically to every attendee, so the comparison between meetings stays consistent.
The recurring number is the one worth looking at
A single meeting costing $340 is unremarkable. The same meeting, weekly, is roughly $16,000 a year — about the cost of a piece of software nobody would buy without a business case, quietly recurring on everyone’s calendar without one. That is the framing that actually changes decisions: not "is this meeting worth an hour" but "is this series worth its annual budget, and would we approve it as a line item?" Note that a weekly meeting is realistically about 48 occurrences rather than 52, once holidays and skipped weeks are counted.
Cost per minute is what makes the overrun visible
Eight people at a $600-per-hour combined rate burn $10 every minute the meeting runs long, and the last ten minutes of a meeting that drifts cost the same as the first ten. The per-minute figure is the one worth remembering when a 30-minute slot routinely becomes 45, when the meeting starts five minutes late while people join, or when the agenda item everyone is waiting on is fourth. It also makes the invite-list question concrete: adding one more person to a recurring hour is a permanent budget increase, not a courtesy.
What this number does not tell you
It is a cost, not a verdict. A costly meeting can be the cheapest way to resolve a decision that would otherwise take two weeks of asynchronous back-and-forth, and the alternative to a meeting is rarely "nothing" — it is usually writing, which also takes time. The honest use of this calculator is as a comparison: this hour against what those same people would otherwise have done with it. It is also a model, not an accounting figure — it assumes attendees are salaried, ignores the fifteen minutes of refocusing a meeting costs on either side, and knows nothing about what was decided. Treat it as a prompt for a conversation, not as financial advice or a performance metric.
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate the cost of a meeting?
Convert each attendee’s annual salary into an hourly cost — salary × overhead multiplier ÷ paid hours per year — add those together for everyone in the room, and multiply by the meeting length in hours. Eight people averaging $110,000 at a 1.25 multiplier over 2,080 hours cost about $529 for an hour together.
What overhead multiplier should I use?
Between 1.25 and 1.4 is the common range for salaried staff, covering payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, and space. Use the low end if benefits are modest, the high end if they are generous or the role carries expensive tooling. Setting it to 1 gives salary only, which understates the real cost but is a defensible floor if you want a conservative number.
Why 2,080 hours a year?
It is 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, the standard full-time figure in the US. It deliberately does not subtract holidays or leave, which means the hourly cost it produces is slightly conservative — dividing by fewer actual working hours would give a higher figure. Change it if your standard week or leave entitlement is different.
Does this include the cost of context switching?
No, and that is a real omission. Research on interruptions consistently finds that returning to focused work after a break takes substantial time, so a one-hour meeting in the middle of an afternoon costs more than an hour of output. The figure here counts only the time in the room, which makes it a floor rather than an estimate of total cost.
Can I use hourly rates instead of salaries?
Yes — multiply the hourly rate by the paid hours per year and enter that as the annual salary, or simply set paid hours per year to 1 and enter the hourly cost directly with the multiplier at 1. For contractors whose rate already includes their own overhead, keep the multiplier at 1 so you are not loading it twice.