Find out the true dollar cost of every meeting before you send that invite.
Meetings are the most expensive item in most organisations’ budget that nobody has bothered to calculate. A one-hour strategy session with 10 senior managers at an average fully-loaded cost of $150 per hour does not cost one hour — it costs $1,500. Schedule that weekly and you are looking at $78,000 per year for a single recurring meeting.
Research from Harvard Business School found that a single weekly executive meeting at one large company consumed 300,000 person-hours per year when the full cascade of preparation, follow-up, and related meetings were counted. The meeting itself was 90 minutes. The total organisational load was enormous.
Most organisations have no visibility into this cost because it is never calculated. HR pays salaries. Finance tracks budgets. Operations measures output. But nobody calculates the cost of time spent in meetings versus the value produced. This calculator makes that invisible cost visible in seconds.
The formula is straightforward: multiply the number of attendees by their average hourly rate, then multiply by the meeting duration in hours. This gives you the total direct salary cost of the meeting — the minimum floor cost that cannot be avoided once the meeting is scheduled.
The actual cost is higher. Research estimates that opportunity cost — the value of work not done during the meeting — adds another 50–100% to the raw salary figure. For a meeting that pulls a software engineer away from a feature they are building, or a salesperson away from a deal they are closing, the real cost can be several multiples of the salary cost alone.
Use this calculator to create a “cost awareness” habit in your team: before scheduling a meeting, calculate what it will cost. This simple act reliably reduces meeting frequency and duration, and forces meeting organisers to ensure the value delivered exceeds the cost incurred.
A useful heuristic: a meeting is worth holding if and only if the output (decision made, alignment achieved, problem solved, relationship built) would have required more time and effort to achieve through asynchronous communication. By that standard, a surprising number of recurring status updates, alignment calls, and “catch-ups” fail the test.
The most valuable meetings share common characteristics: they have a written agenda distributed 24 hours in advance, they end with explicit decisions and named owners, they have no more attendees than necessary (the “two pizza rule” suggests fewer than 8 people), and they start and end on time without exception.
Conversely, the most expensive meetings share a different set of characteristics: open-ended exploratory discussions with no pre-work, recurring meetings that run on autopilot, large attendance lists that include people who “might find it useful”, and no written follow-up that captures what was decided.
Reducing meeting cost does not mean eliminating collaboration. It means making collaboration more intentional and more efficient:
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