Meeting Cost Calculator
Add up what a meeting actually costs in salary time, with overheads. Plug in attendees, salaries and duration, get the meeting cost, what it adds up to over a year if you run it weekly, and the total person-hours sunk. There is also a live ticker for showing the room how much that "quick" sync is currently bleeding.
Explain like I'm 5 (what even is this calculator?)
Every meeting has a price tag. Take everyone's hourly cost (their salary, plus the bits the company pays on top, divided by how many hours they work in a year), add it all up, then multiply by how long the meeting actually runs. The number that falls out is what your company has just spent on people staring at the same Zoom grid for an hour.
Work out the cost
Results
- Cost of this meeting £0.00
- Annualised if held weekly (× 52) £0.00
- Time cost 0 person-hours
Breakdown
| Role | Count | Salary | Hourly cost | Cost |
|---|
Live ticker: meeting in progress
Press start when the meeting begins. The cost climbs in real time. Pause it when someone goes for tea, reset it when you start over. It uses your computer's wall clock, so it does not drift when the tab loses focus.
Prove it
Every figure on this page comes out of the same three lines of arithmetic. No black box. If the breakdown below does not match what you can do on the back of an envelope, the page is wrong, not your envelope.
Formulas
- Hourly rate per person = (annual salary × overheads multiplier) ÷ working hours per year
- Cost per attendee = hourly rate × (duration in minutes ÷ 60)
- Total meeting cost = sum of (cost per attendee × count) across every row
- Annualised weekly cost = total meeting cost × 52
- Live ticker cost = total cost × (elapsed seconds ÷ total seconds), capped at total cost once the meeting time runs out
Working hours per year: 1,800. That is 37.5 hours per week × 48 working weeks (52 weeks minus four weeks of statutory and bank holidays). UK full-time norm. If your team works longer or shorter weeks, the absolute pound figures scale by the same proportion.
Workings used in this calculation
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The honest case for working out what your meetings cost
Most companies have no idea what their meetings cost, which is partly why there are so many of them. A weekly all-hands with eighteen senior people in it can run to a couple of grand a session before anyone has spoken. Run that for a year and you are at six figures, for what is, very often, a slide deck and a quick "any questions?" Working it out once tends to change the conversation about whether the meeting needs to exist at all, who actually needs to be there, and whether 60 minutes was a sensible default or just what the calendar suggested.
When this calculator is useful
It is at its best when someone wants to push back on a recurring meeting and needs an actual number to wave around. "I think this stand-up is a waste of time" loses to "this stand-up is on track to cost the business £42,000 this year and we have not made a decision in it for two months." It is also useful before signing off on a workshop, training session, or off-site, where you can preview the cost of pulling fifteen people away from their actual jobs for a day. Plug in the salaries you can get hold of (LinkedIn, Glassdoor, your finance team if they are friendly), pad them up by 1.3 for overheads, and see what falls out.
Common ways people fudge it
The most common mistake is using the headline salary and ignoring everything else. An employee on £60,000 does not cost £60,000 a year, they cost something closer to £75,000 to £85,000 once you add employer National Insurance, pension contributions, equipment, software licences, holiday cover, and the proportion of office and management overhead they consume. The 1.3 multiplier on this calculator is a defensible default; bigger companies with more generous benefits often work out at 1.4 to 1.5. Set it to 1.0 only if you genuinely want the salary-only floor figure, or if you are pricing contractors who already cover their own overheads.
The second mistake is forgetting the cost of context-switching. The calculator gives you the time spent in the meeting itself. It does not, and cannot, capture the half hour either side: prep, "right, where were we" recovery, the email reply that finally goes out two hours later because someone got their flow broken. Real-world cost is meaningfully higher than the figure on screen. If you want to be ruthless about it, add 30 minutes to the duration field to bake the context-switch tax in.
Edge cases worth knowing
Single attendees give the floor of cost: one person, one hour, their hourly rate. Useful for "is it worth me going to this in person" decisions. Zero duration returns zero (no division by zero, no NaN, no fireworks); useful only as a sanity check that the page is not lying to you. Decimal salaries are fine, the maths runs in floating point. Currency is a label, not a converter: if you change the dropdown after a calculation, the symbol updates but the number does not. Switch overheads to 1.0 to see the raw salary cost without any of the employer tax-and-benefits padding, which is occasionally useful when arguing with people who think overheads are a finance department conspiracy.
Using the live ticker without being a monster
The ticker is, frankly, meant to be slightly horrifying. Share your screen with it running, press start when the meeting actually begins, watch the number climb. Used well, it makes everyone slightly more disciplined about staying on topic and finishing on time. Used badly, it makes you the office accountant nobody wants to invite to anything. Pick your audience. It works best in retrospectives, when looking at a recurring meeting that nobody has audited in a while, or when a senior leader asks why finance keeps querying the L&D budget.
Related calculators
Meeting cost is one lens on time. These cover the others.
Frequently asked questions
What working-hours-per-year figure does this use?
1,800 hours. That is 37.5 hours a week multiplied by 48 working weeks, which is a typical UK full-time figure once you net off statutory holiday and bank holidays. If your team works a different pattern, the absolute pound figures move proportionally, but the relative cost between meetings stays the same.
Why is there an overheads multiplier and what should I set it to?
An employee costs more than their salary. Employer National Insurance, pension contributions, holiday, equipment, software, the desk they sit at, the office that desk lives in. A multiplier of 1.3 is a sensible default for a UK employee with standard benefits. If you are calculating contractor cost (no benefits, no desk), drop it to 1.0. For a London tech employer with generous benefits, 1.4 or 1.5 is closer to reality.
Does the currency selector convert between GBP, USD and EUR?
No, it just changes the symbol on the display. £100,000 stays £100,000 whether you pick GBP, USD or EUR. There is no exchange-rate lookup because exchange rates change daily and the calculator would have to phone a server every time it ran. If you need to compare salaries across currencies, convert your inputs first and then read the result.
Is the annualised weekly cost realistic?
It assumes the same meeting, with the same people, runs once a week for 52 weeks. That is a generous assumption for one-off planning sessions, and a brutally accurate one for the recurring Monday status update that nobody has questioned in three years. If yours falls somewhere in between, scale the figure to your actual cadence.
Can I trust the live ticker?
Yes. It uses your computer's wall clock, not a counter that drifts when the tab loses focus. Pause it when someone fetches coffee, reset it when the meeting really starts, and watch the cost climb in real time. It will not invoice anyone, but the look on their face when they see the number is part of the point.