Meeting Cost Calculator

Meetings are one of the largest hidden costs in many workplaces, but because no invoice ever arrives for them, they rarely get scrutinized the way other expenses do. Putting a dollar figure on a meeting — even a rough one — makes it easier to ask whether a recurring status update, a long stand-up, or an oversized invite list is actually worth what it costs.

It's a reasonable proxy and the standard approach for this kind of quick estimate, since salary data is usually easy to obtain (or approximate) and correlates with what an hour of someone's time is roughly worth to the business. It doesn't capture every nuance — see the next question — but it's good enough for comparing meetings against each other or spotting outliers.

For a more complete picture, many finance teams use a fully-loaded cost — salary plus benefits, payroll tax, and overhead — which typically runs 25-40% higher than base salary alone. This calculator uses base salary divided by 2,080 hours for simplicity, so if you want a more conservative (higher) estimate, you can inflate the salary figures you enter by that percentage before calculating.

The most effective levers are usually the simplest: inviting only people who truly need to be there, defaulting to shorter time slots (25 minutes instead of 30, 50 instead of 60), and replacing status-update meetings with an async written update where no discussion is actually needed. Cutting the invite list in half often cuts the cost in half directly.

Yes — calculate the cost of a single occurrence, then multiply by how often it happens. A $200 meeting that happens weekly costs roughly $10,400 a year; that framing often makes it much easier to decide whether a recurring meeting is earning its keep.