Meeting cost calculator

Salary cost of one meeting, and of a recurring one over a year. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is stored.

How this is calculated

Hourly rate is salary divided by 2,000 working hours a year, the usual convention of forty hours across fifty weeks. Multiply by attendees and duration to get person-hours, then by fifty for a weekly recurring meeting.

Two things it deliberately leaves out. Fully loaded cost — benefits, tax, equipment, overhead — usually runs 1.2 to 1.4 times salary, so the real figure is higher than what you see above. And the cost of the interruption, which is often larger than the meeting.

The number this does not show

A meeting does not only cost its own length. It costs the block it sits in.

An hour-long meeting at 11am does not remove one hour from a morning. It removes the morning, because what remains either side is rarely long enough for anything demanding. Two thirty-minute meetings placed badly can eliminate a whole day of deep work while appearing on the calendar as one hour.

That cost is invisible on a calendar and does not appear in the figure above. It is usually the larger number.

What to do with the result

• Move it, before cancelling it. A recurring meeting at the edge of the day costs a fraction of the same meeting in the middle.
• Cut attendees before cutting length. Cost scales linearly with people and most large meetings have several who could read the notes.
• Halve the default. Sixty minutes is a calendar default, not an estimate. Thirty usually works.
• Check the annual figure for anything recurring. It is the number that changes minds, and nobody ever computes it.

Related: why time blocking fails, where your day actually goes, and how to run a time audit.