Meeting Cost Calculator

Attendees

Average monthly salary

Length, minutes

Times a month

Uplift for contributions and desk, %

Result

One meeting$7,636.36
A month$30,545.45
A year$366,545.45
A minute of it$127.27
An hour of one attendee$1,272.73
Person-hours6

Six people, one hour, one invoice

Calculates what a meeting costs the company in salary time, per meeting, per month and over a year.

An hour of meeting is not an hour. It is an hour multiplied by everyone in the room, priced at what those people cost the company rather than at what they take home.

The annual figure is the one that changes behaviour. A weekly hour with six people is not a small habit; it is a line item, and seeing it written down is usually enough to shorten the agenda.

What this calculator shows

The cost of one meeting, a month of them and a year
The cost of a single minute
The hourly cost of one attendee and the person-hours consumed

What to keep in mind

A month is taken as 165 working hours, the usual average once holidays are spread across the year.
The uplift covers contributions and the workplace. Without it the figure understates the cost by around a third.

FAQs

Should the salary or the full cost be used?

The full cost. The company pays contributions and provides a desk whether the person is in a meeting or not, and that is the money being spent.

Why 165 hours in a month?

Because roughly 1,980 working hours a year spread over twelve months come to about that, once public holidays and leave are taken out.

Does this mean meetings are waste?

No — it means they have a price. A decision worth 7,000 is worth the hour; a status update that could have been three lines of text is not.

What about preparation time?

Not counted here, and it can double the real figure. A meeting that requires everyone to prepare a report costs far more than the room time.

Worked example

A weekly hour for six

Input: 6 people, 150,000 average salary, 60 minutes, 4 times a month, 40 percent uplift

Output: 7,636 a meeting, 366,545 a year

Note: That is 127 a minute. Cutting the meeting to forty minutes and dropping two attendees saves more than half of it without changing anything else.

Useful links

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Meeting Cost Calculator

Result

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