Meeting Cost Calculator
What the room costs per minute, what this meeting costs once, and what the same slot costs across a year if it recurs — using fully-loaded salary rather than base pay, with a live ticker and a single line you can paste into Slack.
Free · No signup · Runs entirely in your browser
Salary alone understates what a meeting costs, because an employer also pays payroll tax, benefits and equipment. This meeting cost calculator uses the fully-loaded figure, and shows what the same slot costs across a year — which is the number that actually ends a recurring meeting.
Everyone invited, including the ones half-listening.
Base pay across the room, per year.
Payroll tax, benefits, equipment. 1.25–1.4 is typical.
Scheduled length, not how long it actually runs.
Halving the invitation list would return $15,600 a year and 208 person-hours — about 5.2 full-time weeks of somebody's year, handed back.
Run it live
Start it when the meeting does. Put it on the shared screen if you are feeling brave.
Send it to someone
A 60-minute meeting with 8 people costs $600. Held weekly, that is $31,200 and 416 person-hours a year.
Most status meetings exist because nobody trusts the written record. If you are building software largely on your own, Tekk turns what you want into specs your coding agent can actually execute — and leaves a trail worth reading.
The arithmetic
loaded salary = salary × loaded cost multiplier
cost per hour = loaded salary ÷ 2,080
cost per minute = cost per hour × attendees ÷ 60
Nothing complicated. The only decision that matters is whether you use base salary or what the employee actually costs — and using base salary is how these numbers end up too low to persuade anyone.
Worked example
Eight people, an average salary of $120,000, a 1.3 loaded multiplier, one hour.
| Step | Working | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Loaded salary | $120,000 × 1.3 | $156,000 |
| Cost per person-hour | $156,000 ÷ 2,080 | $75 |
| Cost per minute | $75 × 8 ÷ 60 | $10 |
| This meeting | $10 × 60 | $600 |
Ten dollars a minute is the figure worth remembering. It makes the five minutes spent waiting for someone to find the right tab cost fifty dollars.
The number that actually ends a meeting
One $600 meeting is an anecdote. The same slot, held weekly:
| Cadence | Times a year | Annual cost | Person-hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Once | 1 | $600 | 8 |
| Monthly | 12 | $7,200 | 96 |
| Fortnightly | 26 | $15,600 | 208 |
| Weekly | 52 | $31,200 | 416 |
| Every working day | 260 | $156,000 | 2,080 |
416 person-hours is ten and a half full-time weeks — a quarter of one person's year, spent by eight people in one-hour instalments.
And a fifteen-minute daily standup with the same eight people costs $39,000 a year, more than the weekly hour. Short and frequent is not automatically cheap.
Why the loaded multiplier matters
Run the same meeting on base salary alone and it costs $461 instead of $600. The missing $139 is not a rounding error — it is the payroll tax, the health insurance, the laptop and the floor space, all of which the company pays whether or not the hour produced anything.
Any finance team will use the loaded figure. Bringing the unloaded one to an argument means losing it on a technicality.
What this does not measure
Three things, all of which make the figure conservative:
Interruption. A meeting at 2pm costs more than its own hour, because it breaks the afternoon either side of it. Nobody has a clean way to price that, so it is left out.
Preparation and follow-up. The document written beforehand and the notes written after are real time, charged to nobody.
The cost of not meeting. Sometimes an hour in a room beats three days of asynchronous drift. This tool measures one side of a trade, and pretending otherwise would make it a worse argument, not a better one.
How it works
- 1
Enter the room, not the invite list
How many people actually attend, their average salary, and how long the meeting is scheduled for. The loaded cost multiplier turns base pay into what the employer really spends — payroll tax, benefits, equipment, desk. This meeting cost calculator uses that figure, because the raw salary understates it by a quarter or more.
- 2
Set the cadence
A one-off costs what it costs. A weekly slot costs fifty-two times that, and a daily standup two hundred and sixty. The annual figure is almost always the one that changes a decision, because a single meeting reads as an anecdote and a yearly total reads as a budget line.
- 3
Start the ticker, or send the line
The ticker counts the money up in real time and is best deployed on a shared screen. The one-line summary underneath is the actual output — a sentence with both numbers in it that can be pasted straight into a thread without any setup.
Frequently asked questions
- How much do meetings cost?
- More than the salaries suggest. Eight people on an average of $120,000, at a typical 1.3 loaded multiplier, cost $75 each per hour — so an hour together is $600, or $10 every minute. Held weekly, that single recurring slot costs $31,200 a year and consumes 416 person-hours.
- What is a loaded cost multiplier?
- The ratio between what an employee is paid and what they cost the employer. On top of salary come payroll taxes, health insurance and other benefits, equipment, software licences and a share of the office. Somewhere between 1.25 and 1.4 is typical for salaried staff, which is why using base pay alone understates a meeting by 25–40%.
- Why divide by 2,080 hours?
- Because 40 hours times 52 weeks is the conventional full-time year, and it is the same divisor the freelance rate calculator on this site uses. Sharing the convention means the two tools cannot quietly disagree about what an hour of someone's time is worth.
- Should I count people who barely participate?
- Yes — that is rather the point. An attendee who spends the hour half-listening costs exactly the same as one who speaks throughout. If the honest answer to "how much do meetings cost" is uncomfortable, the fix is usually a shorter invite list rather than a shorter meeting.
- Does this include the cost of interruption?
- No, and that makes it conservative. A meeting in the middle of an afternoon costs more than its own duration because it fragments the time either side of it — the deep-work argument that a 30-minute slot at 2pm can cost two hours of usable focus. This calculator counts only the meeting itself.
- What is a reasonable meeting cost?
- There is no threshold. A $600 hour that unblocks a quarter's work is cheap; the same hour spent reading a status update aloud is not. A meeting cost calculator is not an argument against meetings — it is a way of asking whether the meeting is worth more than the alternative use of the same hour.
- How do I use this to actually cancel a meeting?
- Send the annual figure, not the per-meeting one. "This costs $600" invites a shrug; "this costs $31,200 and 416 person-hours a year" invites a conversation. The copyable line under the ticker exists for exactly that, and the meeting cost calculator puts both numbers in one sentence so neither needs explaining.
- Is the live ticker serious?
- Half. Putting a counter on the shared screen is a blunt instrument and lands better as a joke than an accusation. It works because it makes an abstract cost continuous and visible, which is the same reason a taxi meter changes how people think about a detour.
- What about the cost of not meeting?
- Real and harder to measure. Decisions made slowly over three days of asynchronous messages can cost more than an hour in a room. This tool deliberately measures only one side of that trade, so treat it as an input to the argument rather than the whole of it.
- Should salaries be averaged or entered individually?
- An average is fine and usually more comfortable to share. Where the room is very mixed — a principal engineer and four interns — the average understates the senior time and the total is what matters anyway. If precision matters, run it twice and add the results.
- Where does the annual figure come from?
- The cost of one meeting multiplied by how often it happens: 52 for weekly, 26 for fortnightly, 12 for monthly, and 260 for every working day. That 260 is 2,080 hours divided by an eight-hour day, so the daily and hourly conventions stay consistent with each other.
- Do you store the numbers I enter?
- No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is logged, and there is no account — which is worth knowing before you type your team's average salary into a web page.
- Why is this free, and what is Tekk?
- Tekk is a spec-driven development platform for people building software with AI coding agents. This calculator costs us nothing to run, and most status meetings exist because nobody trusts the written record — which is a problem we work on. No signup, no run limit, no upsell inside the tool.
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