What does this meeting cost?
A meeting has a price even when nobody invoices it. This works it out from the three numbers you already know.
Cost of this meeting
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Per week, if it is a weekly
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Per year, if it is a weekly
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Running cost, live
$0.00
0:00 elapsed
Formula: people × hourly cost × (minutes ÷ 60)
What the number assumes
Hourly cost means what the person costs the company, not their take-home pay. That is roughly salary plus employer contributions divided by working hours. The yearly figure assumes 46 working weeks.
The formula defines the arithmetic. It does not define your business. A figure from this page is a starting point for a decision rather than the decision.
How a meeting cost is calculated
The cost of a meeting is the number of people in it multiplied by what each of them costs per hour, multiplied by the length of the meeting in hours. Six people at $60 an hour for one hour is $360. That is the whole formula, and its simplicity is the point: it is a number nobody can argue with, which makes it a useful thing to put on a slide.
The figure is a floor, not a ceiling. It counts salary and the employer's share of it, and nothing else. Not the room, not the software, not the work that did not happen because the meeting was in the middle of the afternoon. A meeting always costs at least this much.
Why fully loaded cost, not salary
Salary is what the person receives. Fully loaded cost is what the organisation pays for them to exist: gross salary plus employer social contributions, plus the share of holiday and sick leave, plus the fixed costs that follow a head rather than a project. Depending on the country and the employer, that is commonly a quarter to a third above gross salary.
Using take-home pay instead understates every meeting by roughly the same proportion, which sounds harmless until the number is used to compare two options. Consistency matters more than precision here: pick one basis, write it down, and use it everywhere.
What the number leaves out
The largest omitted cost is the interruption. Focused work has a warm-up, and a meeting placed in the middle of an afternoon does not remove one hour from that afternoon. It removes the hour plus whatever it takes each attendee to get back into what they were doing. This is well established in practice and impossible to put in a formula honestly, because it varies enormously by person, by task and by how much notice they had.
The second omission is the decision that did not get made. A meeting that ends without one has cost its full price and returned nothing, and that is far more common than an expensive meeting that was worth it.
The third is opportunity: for a client-billing team, an hour in an internal meeting is an hour that could have been invoiced. For those teams the real cost is closer to the billable rate than to the salary cost, which is a substantially larger number.
How to use the figure without being tiresome about it
The number is most useful on recurring meetings, where it compounds. A weekly hour with six people at $60 costs about $16,500 a year. That is a hire's worth of budget spent on one slot in the calendar, and it justifies asking what the slot is for, which is a different question from whether the meeting is pleasant.
It is least useful as a weapon. Putting a running total on a screen during a meeting produces a room that hurries rather than a room that decides, and hurried decisions get remade. Work out the cost before you schedule something, not while you are in it.
The practical test is simple: if the meeting were replaced by a written update that everyone read at their own pace, what would be lost? If the honest answer is nothing, the calculator has already paid for itself.
Questions
Should I use salary or fully loaded cost?
Fully loaded. Salary alone understates a meeting by roughly a fifth to a third, depending on the country and the employer contributions.
Does this include the cost of interruption?
No. Switching out of focused work and back into it costs more time than the meeting itself, but that cost varies too much per person to put in a formula honestly.
What hourly cost should I use if I do not know salaries?
Use a band rather than a guess at an individual. Take the midpoint of the salary range you would advertise the role at, add roughly 25 to 35 per cent for employer contributions, benefits and equipment, and divide by about 1,700 working hours a year. The result is close enough for a decision about whether a meeting should exist.
Does a shorter meeting actually save that money?
Only if the time goes somewhere. Cutting a weekly hour to forty minutes saves nothing if the twenty minutes evaporate. It saves the full amount if those twenty minutes land on work that would otherwise have happened later. Treat the figure as the size of the prize, not as money already banked.
Should the meeting organiser's preparation time be included?
Include it when you are deciding whether to hold a recurring meeting, and leave it out when you are comparing two one-off options. Preparation for a standing meeting is a standing cost, often thirty to sixty minutes a week for one person, and it is invisible in the calendar.
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