What the Meeting Cost Calculator does
This calculator puts a price on a meeting: everyone's pay for the time they spend in it, plus the preparation before and the follow-up after, and - for a recurring meeting - what it adds up to over a year. You describe attendees as groups of similar pay rather than named people, and nothing you type leaves the page.
The point is not that meetings are bad. It is that a weekly hour with seven people is a standing commitment of hundreds of person-hours a year, and seeing that number makes it easier to decide whether the meeting needs all seven people, the full hour, or every week.
How to use it
- Add a group for each kind of attendee - for example 5 engineers on an annual salary, 1 product manager, 1 contractor on an hourly rate. Enter the number of people and typical pay for the group.
- Enter the meeting length and the minutes each attendee spends preparing and following up. Leave these at zero if you only want the time in the room.
- Choose how often it happens and how many occurrences a year are skipped for holidays or cancellations.
- Check the pay assumptions: working hours per year turns an annual salary into an hourly rate, and on-costs add employer taxes, pension and benefits on top of pay.
- Read the cost per meeting and per year, the breakdown by group, and copy the one-line summary to share it.
Reading the results
Per meeting is the full cost of one occurrence including preparation and follow-up. Per minute of meeting divides that by the scheduled length, which makes it easy to price an overrun: ten minutes late finishing costs ten times that figure.
Person-hours per year is often more persuasive than money, because it is the same unit as the work the meeting displaces. Dividing it by the working hours in a year gives the share of a full-time person the meeting consumes.
The breakdown by group shows where the money goes. When one group dominates the cost but rarely contributes, sending notes instead of an invitation is the cheapest saving available.
Worked example: a weekly team meeting
Five engineers on 85,000 a year, a product manager on 95,000 and a contract designer at 70 an hour meet for 60 minutes every week. Each spends 10 minutes preparing and 5 following up, so every attendee gives 75 minutes. The company works 1,950 hours a year and adds 25% on-costs.
An engineer costs 85,000 / 1,950 = 43.59 an hour, 54.49 with on-costs, so five of them for 1.25 hours cost 340.54. The product manager costs 60.90 an hour loaded, 76.12 for the meeting, and the designer 70 x 1.25 x 1.25 = 109.38. One meeting costs 526.04, of which 105.21 is preparation and follow-up.
With 4 weeks skipped for holidays it runs 48 times a year: 48 x 526.04 = 25,250 and 48 x 8.75 = 420 person-hours - about a fifth of one full-time person's year.
Formulas and scoring rules
- Hourly rate
hourly = annual salary / working hours per year; hourly = daily rate / 8Hourly rates are used as entered.- Loaded rate
loaded = hourly x (1 + on-costs / 100)- Cost per meeting
cost = sum over groups of people x loaded x (length + prep + follow-up) / 60Minutes are converted to hours; nothing is rounded until display.- Cost per year
per year = cost per meeting x max(0, occurrences - skipped)Occurrences: daily 260 (5 a week), weekly 52, fortnightly 26, monthly 12, quarterly 4.- Person-hours
person-hours = people x (length + prep + follow-up) / 60
Salary is not the whole cost - and not the only one
Pay understates what an hour of someone's time costs the organisation, which is why the on-cost field exists. Ask finance for the figure they use in budgeting; if you do not have one, leave it at zero and say so when you share the number, rather than guessing.
The calculator also leaves out the cost it cannot measure: the work that did not happen. An hour-long meeting in the middle of an afternoon can break the only stretch of focused time an engineer had that day. That is real, but it is not a number anyone can type in honestly, so it is not added.
Limitations: what the result does not prove
- It prices time, not value. A costly meeting that prevents a costly mistake is a bargain; the calculator cannot tell you which meetings those are.
- Pay is averaged within each group. Use groups of genuinely similar pay if you want the breakdown to mean anything.
- Converting salary to an hourly rate assumes the hours per year you enter. Salaried staff who routinely work longer hours have a lower effective rate than the figure shown.
- Context-switching and lost focus time are not included, so the true cost is usually higher than the figure here.
Privacy: where your data goes
Everything you paste, type or drop is processed in this browser tab. It is not uploaded, logged, stored or sent to analytics. Session recording and tag-manager scripts are switched off on this page.
Frequently asked questions
How do I calculate the cost of a meeting?
Convert each attendee's pay to an hourly rate, add on-costs, multiply by the hours each person spends including preparation and follow-up, and add everyone together. For a recurring meeting, multiply by the number of times it actually happens in a year.
What working hours per year should I use to turn a salary into an hourly rate?
Use your contracted hours: 37.5 hours x 52 weeks is 1,950, 40 x 52 is 2,080. If you prefer the cost of productive time, subtract holidays and public holidays first - which gives a higher hourly rate and a higher meeting cost.
Should preparation and follow-up time be included?
If people actually spend it, yes - reading papers, writing updates, sending actions. For a decision meeting with a pre-read, preparation can cost as much as the meeting itself. Set both to zero if you only want the time in the room.
Is my salary data stored or sent anywhere?
No. The arithmetic runs in your browser, nothing is saved, and there is deliberately no share link because it would carry pay figures in the address. Copy the summary text instead; it contains only totals.
How much does a recurring weekly meeting cost over a year?
Multiply the cost of one meeting by the weeks it really runs - usually 52 minus holidays and cancellations. A one-hour weekly meeting of seven people with a little preparation can easily reach several hundred person-hours a year, as the worked example shows.
Last reviewed by the A2Z.Tools team against the sources listed above.
