The formula
A meeting costs the time of everyone in it, priced at what that time is paid:
meeting cost = length in hours × number of attendees × average hourly rate
The hourly rate comes from annual salary. A full-time year is 52 weeks of 40 hours, or 2,080 hours, so:
hourly rate = annual salary ÷ 2,080
At a $100,000 salary that is $48.08 an hour, or about 80 cents a minute, per person.
So a one-hour meeting of eight people on $100,000 costs 1 × 8 × $48.08 = $385. Held weekly, that is 52 meetings and $20,000 a year, for one recurring invite.
Read it off a table
Every figure below assumes a $100,000 average salary, which is $48.08 an hour. If your team earns more or less, scale the number in proportion: at $150,000, multiply by 1.5.
| Attendees | 15 minutes | 30 minutes | 60 minutes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | $36 | $72 | $144 |
| 5 | $60 | $120 | $240 |
| 8 | $96 | $192 | $385 |
| 12 | $144 | $288 | $577 |
To turn one meeting into a year, multiply by how often it runs:
| Cadence | Meetings a year |
|---|---|
| Daily, weekdays | 260 |
| Weekly | 52 |
| Every two weeks | 26 |
| Monthly | 12 |
Or skip the arithmetic: the meeting cost calculator does both steps at once and shows the result by the meeting, the week, the month and the year.
Three worked examples
A daily standup
Eight engineers, 15 minutes, every weekday, at $100,000 each.
- One standup: 0.25 hours × 8 × $48.08 = $96
- A year of them: $96 × 260 = $25,000
Fifteen minutes sounds cheap. Run every working day, it costs as much as a quarter of one engineer's salary. That does not make it a bad meeting, but it is a figure worth knowing before adding a ninth person to it. There is a fuller version of this in the real cost of your weekly standup.
A weekly team meeting with mixed salaries
When salaries differ, add up each person's rate instead of using an average. A one-hour weekly meeting with one manager on $150,000, four engineers on $130,000 and a designer on $110,000:
| Person | Annual salary | Hourly rate |
|---|---|---|
| Manager | $150,000 | $72.12 |
| Engineers (4) | $130,000 each | $62.50 each, $250.00 together |
| Designer | $110,000 | $52.88 |
| Total | $375.00 |
That is $375 a meeting and $19,500 a year at 52 meetings.
A one-off decision meeting
Twelve people, one hour, average salary $100,000: $577. Before booking it, ask whether the decision needs twelve people in the same hour or two people and a written summary. How to run a $0 meeting has a three-question test for that.
What the formula leaves out
The formula gives a floor, not the full cost. It leaves out three things.
Everything an employer pays beyond salary. Payroll taxes, health insurance, 401(k) contributions, equipment and office space are all paid per person per hour, and none of them are in the salary figure. The formula above ignores them, so it understates the real cost of everyone's time.
The time around the meeting. Getting back into deep work after an interruption takes time. Researcher Gloria Mark, who shadowed office workers through their days, found that interrupted work took an average of 23 minutes to get back to. A meeting placed in the middle of a morning breaks it into two shorter blocks, and short blocks are where little gets finished. The focus time audit shows how much usable time a day of meetings leaves.
What the people in the room would otherwise have done. This is the real cost, and the hardest to put a number on. Salary is a proxy: it says what the business pays for an hour of someone's time, which is a reasonable lower bound on what it expects that hour to produce.
Getting the inputs right
- Count the people who attend, not the people who are invited. Someone who declined costs nothing. Someone who said "maybe" and turned up costs the same as everyone else.
- Do not price people outside the company. A client or candidate on the call costs your payroll nothing.
- Use the real length. A meeting booked for 30 minutes that always runs to 40 costs a third more than its invite says.
- Use salaries, or honest estimates of them. If individual pay is sensitive, which it usually is, price by role: an average salary for each job title, from your own payroll or from public data such as the US government's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, which publishes median pay for hundreds of jobs.
Doing this for every meeting, not one
One calculation changes how people think about one meeting. The useful version is the same arithmetic run across every meeting on every calendar, every week, so recurring meetings that quietly grew from four people to eleven show up on their own.
That is what Hourari does. It connects to Google Calendar or Outlook, prices each meeting from who actually attends, using the rule described in our docs, and shows which recurring meetings cost the most.