Meeting cost calculator
A weekly hour with eight people is a full working week every year.
Meetings are usually judged on whether they were useful, never on what they cost. This calculator multiplies duration by attendees by hourly rate, then projects the annual figure for anything recurring, which is where the numbers get uncomfortable.
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Calculate the cost
Enter the duration, the number of attendees and an hourly rate. Save meetings to compare them side by side.
Meeting details
Cost summary
- $100
- Per meeting
- $5,200
- Per year
- Weekly
- 4 h
- People-hours
Preparation, follow-up and the cost of interrupting focused work are not included, so the real figure is higher.
Saved meetings
Nothing saved yet. Save a meeting to compare it with others.
How to use the number
The figure is only useful if it changes a decision.
Compare it to the outcome
If a recurring meeting costs more per year than a small project, it should be delivering more than a status update.
Question the attendee list
Cost scales linearly with people. Removing three optional attendees from a weekly hour is the fastest saving available.
Shorten before you cancel
Cutting sixty minutes to thirty halves the cost and usually loses nothing, since most hour-long meetings are thirty minutes of content.
Check the recurring ones first
A one-off workshop is rarely the problem. The standing weekly that nobody has questioned in two years usually is.
Why cost awareness changes meetings
Nobody spends four thousand dollars without asking why. Meetings get a pass.
Makes an invisible cost visible
Salary time spent in a meeting never appears on a budget line, so it never gets the scrutiny an equivalent purchase would.
Prioritises the high-impact ones
Ranking meetings by annual cost immediately shows which three deserve a hard look and which are rounding errors.
Makes attendance a decision
"Optional" gets treated as "expected" until someone puts a number on each additional attendee.
Supports asynchronous alternatives
A written update that replaces a weekly hour is easy to justify once the yearly cost of that hour is on the table.
Frequently asked questions
What hourly rate should I use?
Fully loaded cost, not salary: gross pay plus employer contributions, benefits and overhead, which typically lands between 1.25 and 1.4 times salary. Using bare salary understates the real figure noticeably.
How is the yearly cost calculated?
Daily meetings are multiplied by 260 sessions (five days across fifty-two weeks), weekly by 52, and monthly by 12. One-off meetings show the same figure as the per-meeting cost.
Does this include preparation and follow-up?
No, so the real cost is higher. Preparation, context switching and the recovery time after an interrupted block are not counted here, so the figure you see is the floor, not the ceiling.
Other free tools
Three more tools that pair well with this one.
Pomodoro Timer
Work in focused 25-minute sessions with short breaks, and let the timer decide when it is time to rest.
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Long focus sessions with ambient background sound, so a noisy room stops competing for your attention.
Try it nowTask Prioritization Matrix
Sort tasks by urgency and importance with the Eisenhower matrix, and see what genuinely deserves your morning.
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See what meetings really cost your team
Worktivity measures how much of the week goes to meetings versus focused work, per person and per team.
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