How to calculate the cost of a meeting
- Add the groups of people who attend, with how many there are and their average annual salary. Use rough bands rather than individual salaries.
- Set the length of the meeting and the overhead on top of salary: employer taxes, pensions, benefits and office costs typically add 20–40%.
- Choose how often it repeats to see the yearly cost. Press Start during a real meeting to watch the cost tick up live, and share the result.
Why meeting costs add up
A meeting's price is never on an invoice, so it is easy to treat it as free. Seven people with average salaries of 60,000 plus 30% overhead cost about 320 an hour together. A weekly one-hour status meeting with that group costs over 16,000 a year, before counting the time spent preparing, travelling between rooms and getting back into focused work afterwards. The hourly cost is salary × (1 + overhead) ÷ working hours per year; about 1,720 hours is typical for a full-time employee once holidays are taken out.
Putting a number on meetings is a powerful nudge. Before booking, ask whether the decision could be made asynchronously in a document or chat, whether everyone invited needs to be there, and whether 25 minutes would do instead of an hour. Share an agenda in advance and end with clear actions and owners. Some teams show a live cost meter on screen in long meetings. Salaries you enter stay in your browser and are not sent anywhere.
How do I calculate an employee's hourly cost?
Annual salary × (1 + overhead %) ÷ working hours per year. For example, 50,000 × 1.3 ÷ 1,720 ≈ 37.79 an hour.
What overhead percentage should I use?
20–40% is common, covering employer taxes, pension, benefits, equipment and office space.
How can we reduce meeting costs?
Invite fewer people, shorten default meeting lengths, cancel recurring meetings that no longer need to happen, and share updates in writing.