Meeting Cost Calculator — What Your Meetings Really Cost
Attendees, pay, duration and frequency give the cost of one meeting and a year of them, with a live meter you can run during the meeting.
Share your screen with the meter running. It is the fastest agenda discipline there is.
Nothing you enter is sent or stored. The recurring meeting that exists to move information between people is usually a workflow an AI agent can run. See what we automate.
Found a problem, or something that could be better? We read every message and we fix things quickly.
This free meeting cost calculator puts a dollar figure on a meeting: who is in it, what they are paid, how long it runs and how often. It shows the cost of one meeting, the cost of a year of them, and what a 25 percent shorter version would save, and it has a live meter that counts the money up while a real meeting is running. Share your screen with it once and the agenda tightens by itself.
A weekly one-hour meeting for seven people on ordinary salaries costs the business roughly forty to sixty thousand dollars a year once benefits, overhead and preparation are counted. Nobody would approve that as a line item, yet it exists in most calendars unquestioned. The number is not an argument against meetings; it is an argument for knowing which ones earn their cost, and for asking whether the recurring status meeting is really a document that could write itself.
How to use
- Add groups of attendees: a role, how many people, and pay per year or per hour. Two or three groups usually cover a meeting.
- Set the length and how often it recurs. Tick fully loaded cost to include benefits, payroll tax and overhead (about 30 percent on top of salary).
- Add prep and context-switch minutes per person; ten is a conservative default.
- Read the cost per meeting and per year, and what shortening it by a quarter would save.
- During a real meeting, press Start on the live meter and share your screen.
Frequently asked questions
How is the hourly cost calculated from a salary?
Annual pay divided by 2,080 hours (52 weeks × 40 hours). With fully loaded cost on, that figure is multiplied by 1.3 to cover benefits, employer payroll taxes, workspace and equipment; 1.25 to 1.4 is the usual range for North American employers. Switch a group to per-hour for contractors.
Why include prep time?
Because a 30-minute meeting is never 30 minutes. People stop what they were doing a few minutes early, gather materials, and take time afterwards to get back into focused work. Ten minutes per person is conservative; research on task switching suggests more. Set it to zero if you want the bare meeting cost.
Is the yearly figure realistic?
It assumes the meeting happens every scheduled time with everyone present, which overstates slightly, and it excludes the opportunity cost of what those hours would otherwise produce, which understates by more. Treat it as an order of magnitude, which is enough to decide whether a meeting deserves its slot.
What should I do with a meeting that costs too much?
First ask what decision or output it exists to produce. If the answer is “to share status”, replace it with a written update and keep a shorter meeting for decisions only. Cut attendees to the people who decide or act; others get the notes. Halve the default length: 25 minutes forces an agenda. And review recurring meetings quarterly; most outlive their reason.
Can AI replace some meetings?
The status-sharing kind, often. An agent that reads the project tools and drafts a weekly summary, answers “where are we on X” from the documents, and flags what actually needs a decision removes the reason for a large share of recurring meetings. That is one of the most common first automation projects we build.
Meetings that earn their cost
A meeting is worth its cost when it produces something that could not be produced asynchronously: a decision with trade-offs, a negotiation, a design session, a difficult conversation. It is not worth its cost when its output is information that could have been written down. The test is simple: could the outcome be a document? If yes, write the document and cancel the meeting.
The cheap fixes
Default to 25 and 50 minutes instead of 30 and 60. Publish the agenda and the decision needed in the invitation; no agenda, no meeting. Make attendance optional for anyone who is only there to listen and send them the notes. End when the decision is made, not when the calendar slot ends. And run the live meter once in a meeting that feels too long; it is more persuasive than any policy.
Related free tools
- AI ROI Calculator — Estimate how many hours and dollars automating a repetitive task could save your business every year.
- AI Readiness Assessment — Twelve questions across data, process, technology, people, leadership and governance. Get a score, a maturity level and where to start. No email required.
- Break-Even Calculator — Fixed costs, unit cost and price give your break-even point, contribution margin, the units needed for a target profit, and the price for a chosen margin.