Meeting Cost Calculator

The meeting cost calculator is a free tool that helps teams and managers quantify the true financial cost of any business meeting. It is especially useful for engineering leads, operations managers, and executives who want to reduce unnecessary meetings and improve organisational efficiency.

To calculate the cost of a meeting, select the average seniority level of your attendees (or enter a custom annual salary), adjust the number of attendees and the meeting duration using the sliders, and the calculator updates instantly. The tool derives an hourly rate from the annual salary (salary ÷ 2,080 working hours), multiplies by duration and headcount, then adds a 30% productivity recovery overhead to account for the time lost re-engaging with focused work after the meeting ends. Expand the "Recurring cost" panel to see the annual cost of a regularly scheduled meeting.

Use this calculator before scheduling a large review meeting to check whether the cost justifies the value, or after a team retrospective to make the case for shorter stand-ups and async updates. Sharing the output with a team often prompts meaningful conversations about meeting hygiene. For example, a weekly one-hour status meeting with eight senior engineers can easily cost $50,000–$80,000 per year once productivity recovery is included.