Meeting Cost Calculator
Attendees times salaries times minutes. Sometimes the number ends the meeting.
Assumes 2,080 working hours a year (52 weeks at 40 hours). Overhead uses a common 1.3x rule of thumb for the true cost of an employee. Estimates, not accounting.
Eight people are in a room while one of them reads slides aloud. Everyone can read. Nobody says anything, because the meeting is free. Except it is not, it is eight salaries on the clock at once.
Put the numbers in and see it. Attendee count and an average salary gets you a fast estimate, or enter each salary for the honest version. You get cost per hour, per minute, and per person, plus a live meter you can start when the meeting starts and, if you are brave, share on screen.
A weekly hour that costs 800 dollars should produce more than a recap. Now you can check.
How the cost is worked out
Each attendee's salary is divided by 2,080, the working hours in a year of 52 forty hour weeks, to give an hourly cost. With overhead switched on, that figure is multiplied by 1.3 to cover benefits, payroll tax and equipment. The hourly costs are added together and multiplied by the meeting length in hours.
Meeting cost = the sum of (salary ÷ 2,080 × 1.3) for everyone in the room × minutes ÷ 60.
A worked example
Eight people averaging $85,000 a year cost about $40.87 an hour each in salary, $326.92 an hour together. With overhead that becomes $425 an hour, a little over $7 a minute.
A one hour weekly status meeting at that level costs $425 every time it runs, and $22,100 over a year of 52 weeks. That is the figure to weigh against what the meeting actually produces.
What the estimate leaves out
The meeting's own minutes are only part of the cost. Preparation, travel between rooms and the time it takes each person to get back into their own work afterward are real, and none of them are in this number.
The overhead is a rule of thumb. The 1.3 multiplier is a common estimate, and the true cost of an employee can run higher. The employee cost calculator works it out properly for a single role.
An average hides seniority. If two directors join six analysts, entering each salary separately gives a more honest total than one average across the room.
Now find out where the rest of the week went.
A meeting's cost is easy to total once you know it happened. The harder question is what the other thirty hours went to. PomoTodo attributes every focus session to a project, so the time that quietly disappears into one client shows up as hours, and as money.
Free plan tracks unlimited focus time across unlimited tasks. No card required.
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Questions
How is the cost of a meeting calculated?
Each attendee's annual salary is divided by 2,080 working hours to get an hourly cost, then summed across everyone in the room and multiplied by the meeting length. Turn on overhead to multiply by 1.3, a common rule of thumb for benefits, tax, and tooling on top of salary.
What is the live meter for?
Start it when the meeting starts and watch the cost tick up in real time. It is surprisingly persuasive on a shared screen when a thirty minute sync is entering its second hour.
Is this meant to say all meetings are bad?
No. Some meetings are the cheapest way to make a decision. The point is to give the hour a price so you compare it against what it produced, and cut the ones that lose that comparison every week.