Meeting Cost Calculator
Add attendee roles, headcounts, and salaries to see the true cost of any meeting — per minute, per meeting, and per year. Spot expensive meetings and cut wasted time.
Common: standup 15, sync 30, review 60, planning 90
Uses ~250 working days/year for daily meetings (excludes weekends/holidays).
Tap presets above or add a custom row. Enter annual salary OR hourly rate — the calculator converts using 2,080 hours/year.
1.0 = base salary only · 1.25 = +25% for benefits/taxes · 1.4 = fully loaded. Standard range 1.15-1.40.
💰 Cost Per Meeting
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— per minute · — attendees · — min
Per Minute
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hourly burn rate
Per Year
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—
Hours/Year
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in this meeting
Cost breakdown by role
💡 What this means
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🎙️ Run tighter meetings?
📓 See top-rated meeting notebooks & planners on Amazon →📌 5 Ways to Cut Meeting Costs
- ✓ Cancel status meetings. A weekly 60-minute team sync of 8 people earning $90K averages $20,700/year. Move status to a doc or Slack thread and reclaim ~40 hours per person annually. Use the calculator to put a dollar figure on the meeting before you schedule it.
- ✓ Shrink the room. Every extra attendee at $40+/hour adds up. The 2-pizza rule (Bezos) caps meetings at ~6-8 people. Optional attendees should get the notes after, not a seat in the room — a 10-person meeting cut to 5 saves 50% instantly.
- ✓ Default to 30 minutes. Parkinson's Law: work expands to fill the time allotted. Cutting 60 to 30 halves the cost with no loss in outcomes when there's an agenda. Most decisions take 15-20 minutes once the small talk is gone.
- ✓ Send an agenda + pre-read. Meetings without agendas run 30-50% longer. A 5-line agenda + 1-page pre-read lets people arrive ready to decide instead of getting up to speed live — saving the most expensive minutes of the meeting.
- ✓ Record + share async. Record decision meetings and share the link so optional attendees can skip live attendance. A 30-minute recording watched at 1.5x speed saves each viewer 10 minutes — multiplied across 20 optional attendees, that's 3+ hours reclaimed per meeting.
Disclaimer: This calculator estimates labor cost only — it does not capture opportunity cost (what attendees could have built instead), context-switching recovery time (~23 min per interruption per research), or meeting prep/follow-up time (often 2-3x the meeting length). Salaries convert using a 2,080-hour work year, which excludes vacation/holidays and slightly understates true hourly cost. Use the loaded-cost multiplier (1.25-1.4x) to account for benefits, payroll taxes, office space, and equipment. Numbers are planning estimates, not accounting figures.
Related Tools
These six tools help you measure and reclaim the rest of your workday — from focus time to commute cost to the true value of your hours.
- Freelancer Hourly Rate Calculator — flip the lens: instead of meeting cost, calculate the hourly rate you need to charge to hit your income target as a freelancer.
- Task Priority Matrix — sort the work that fills your calendar into urgent/important quadrants so the meetings you keep are the ones that actually move the needle.
- Pomodoro Timer — protect the focus blocks you freed up by cutting meetings. 25-minute work sprints with 5-minute breaks, right in your browser.
- Lifetime Earnings Calculator — put your hourly rate in context. See how much a year of meetings is worth over a full career at your current salary.
- Cost of Commute Calculator — the other daily time sink. See how much your commute really costs per month and per year, then weigh it against remote work.
- Overtime Calculator (Canada) — if meetings push you past 40 hours, calculate the overtime pay you should be tracking. Pairs with the loaded-cost view above.