Meeting Cost Calculator

Written byOleh Soloninupdated 5 October 2026

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.

How to use

Enter the number of attendees and the length in minutes.
Enter the average monthly salary of those attending.
Set overheads as a percentage: they turn salary into the real cost of an hour.
Say how often the meeting recurs in a month — the annual figure follows from it.

What each extra attendee costs

Each row is a run of this calculator at a salary of 150,000, an hour in length, 40 percent overheads and four meetings a month. The cost rises in step with the head count.

The annual column is the interesting one. A weekly meeting of twenty people swallows more than 1.2 million a year — about 0.71 of the full annual cost of the employee in the calculator next door (1,716,000), spent purely on attendance.

Runs of this calculator at a salary of 150,000, an hour in length, 40% overheads and four meetings a month.
Attendees	Per meeting	Per month	Per year	Cost per minute
4	5,091	20,364	244,364	84.85
6	7,636	30,545	366,545	127.27
10	12,727	50,909	610,909	212.12
20	25,455	101,818	1,221,818	424.24

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, a working assumption; the real cost of an hour depends on the calendar, the schedule and absences.
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.

How is the cost of a meeting worked out?

Attendees times length times the real cost of an hour of work. At a salary of 150,000 and 40 percent overheads an hour costs 1,272.73, so six people for an hour come to 7,636.

Why include overheads?

Because salary is not the whole cost of an hour: contributions, the workplace and the hardware sit on top. Leave them out and the figure is short: with a 40 percent uplift you drop 40 percent of salary, which is 28.6 percent of the full cost — and any comparison against the alternative becomes unfair.

Worked example

An hour for six, four times a month

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.

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Result

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