LetsColab

Meeting cost calculator

Who is in the room, what their time costs, and how long it lasts. The result updates as you type.

Role or group People Pay each Per
1 for a one-off, 48 for weekly
40 h × 52 weeks
1 = pay only

This meeting costs

$452

8 people for 60 minutes: $7.53 a minute, 8 person-hours. At 48 times a year that is $21,692 and 384 person-hours.

The link contains the pay figures you entered, encoded after the #. Share it only with people who may see them.

Same people, other lengths and frequencies

Yearly cost for the attendees above. “Daily” assumes about 230 working days a year.

Length OnceWeekly (48/yr)Daily (230/yr)
15 min $113$5,423$25,986
30 min $226$10,846$51,971
45 min $339$16,269$77,957
60 min $452$21,692$103,942
90 min $678$32,538$155,913

The formula

A meeting costs the combined hourly cost of everyone in it, multiplied by its length in hours. For each group of attendees:

There is no model beyond that. The calculator also reports person-hours, which is the same quantity without the money: eight people for an hour is eight hours of working time, whatever anyone is paid. Person-hours are often the more persuasive number, because they do not invite an argument about whose salary is in the spreadsheet.

A worked example

A weekly one-hour product sync has five engineers on $120,000, a manager on $150,000 and two designers on $95,000.

Together that is about $452 an hour, or $7.53 a minute. Held 48 times a year, the meeting costs roughly $21,700 in salary time and 384 person-hours, which is more than nine full 40-hour working weeks. Cutting it to 30 minutes halves both. Letting two of the eight attendees read the notes instead saves a quarter of the person-hours.

Salary or fully loaded cost?

An employee costs their employer more than their pay: payroll taxes, pension or retirement contributions, health cover, equipment and office space come on top. Finance teams call the total the “fully loaded” cost. How much it adds varies a great deal by country, company size and role, so the multiplier defaults to 1 (pay only) rather than guessing.

For a reference point in the United States, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Employer Costs for Employee Compensation survey has in recent years put benefits at roughly 30% of total compensation for civilian workers, which corresponds to a multiplier of about 1.4 on wages. That average leaves out equipment and overhead, and it differs between sectors, so use your own organisation’s figure when you have one.

What the number does and does not mean

The figure is an opportunity cost, not a cash cost. Cancelling a meeting does not reduce payroll; it frees the time for something else. The useful question is therefore not “is $452 a lot?” but “would these eight people produce more than this in the same hour if they were not here?”. For a decision meeting with the right people, often not. For a status update that could be a written note, often yes.

The calculation also leaves out things that are real but hard to price: preparation time, the minutes lost switching back into focused work afterwards, and the cost of a decision made badly because the right person was not invited. Treat the result as a floor, not an estimate of total value.

This is general information for thinking about how time is spent. It is not accounting or payroll advice.

Common questions

How do you calculate the cost of a meeting?

Add up everyone’s hourly cost and multiply by the length of the meeting in hours. For salaried people, hourly cost is annual salary divided by paid hours per year, usually 2,080 (40 hours × 52 weeks). Eight people averaging $56 an hour cost about $450 for a one-hour meeting.

Should I use salary or total employment cost?

Salary alone understates what an hour of someone’s time costs the employer, because payroll taxes, benefits and equipment come on top. If your finance team has a “fully loaded” cost per employee, enter the ratio as the multiplier. If not, leave it at 1 and say that the figure is salary only.

Why 2,080 hours?

It is 40 hours a week for 52 weeks, the standard figure for turning a US annual salary into an hourly rate. It ignores holidays and leave, which slightly understates the true hourly rate. Change it to match your contract, for example 37.5 × 52 = 1,950.

Does cancelling the meeting save that money?

Not in cash. Salaries are paid either way. What the figure measures is the value of the time: an hour spent in the meeting is an hour not spent on something else. The honest comparison is whether the meeting produces more than the same people would produce in that hour otherwise.

Is salary information sent anywhere?

No. The calculation runs in your browser and nothing is uploaded. If you press “Copy share link”, the numbers you entered are put into the link itself, so only share it with people who may see them. Using averages or rounded bands avoids sharing anyone’s real pay.

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