Meeting Cost Calculator
Time is money—literally. Quantify the financial impact of your meetings. Enter attendee details to reveal the hidden burn rate of synchronous collaboration.
Enter meeting details to reveal the cost.
The Hidden Tax of Meetings
In modern corporate culture, meetings are often treated as "free" time. If a meeting room is available, it gets booked. However, when you aggregate the salaries of every participant, a simple one-hour status update can easily cost the company over $1,000. This calculator exposes that invisible price tag, encouraging teams to be more intentional with their time.
Calculating the True Rate
Most employees underestimate their hourly cost to the company. It's not just the gross salary; it's the "fully loaded" cost, which includes benefits, taxes, insurance, and equipment. A general rule of thumb is to take the gross salary and multiply it by 1.2 to 1.4. While this calculator uses the numbers you provide, keep in mind that the real cost to the organization is likely 20-30% higher than what you see on the screen.
Opportunity Cost
The financial cost is only half the story. The "Man-Hours Burned" metric represents time not spent coding, designing, selling, or strategizing. If 10 engineers spend an hour in a meeting, that is 10 hours of development time lost. For high-growth companies, this opportunity cost—the value of what wasn't built—far exceeds the raw salary expense.
Tips for Reducing Meeting Costs
- The "Two Pizza" Rule: Amazon famously suggests that if two pizzas aren't enough to feed the attendees, the meeting is too big.
- Hard Stops: Default to 25 or 50-minute meetings instead of 30 or 60. This creates natural buffers and forces conciseness.
- Async First: Before booking a recurring slot, ask: "Can this be a Slack update or a shared document?"