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Meeting cost calculator

Calculate the real cost of meetings with live ticker, annual impact, and optimization tips.

Free & unlimitedWorks offline
Presets
Participants5
Currency
Avg hourly rate
Work the rate out from an annual salary

Salary x multiplier / 2,080 paid hours a year. The 1.45 figure comes from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics Employer Costs for Employee Compensation series, where benefits are about 31 % of total compensation. Payroll taxes, benefits and employer contributions differ by country, so treat every multiplier as editable.

Meeting duration
Custommin
Meetings / week (for annual projection)3
Meeting cost estimate

$2,500.00

For a 60-minute meeting with 5 people

Cost breakdown

Per second

$0.69

Per minute

$41.67

Per person total

$500.00

Total (60 min)

$2,500.00

$2,500.00 is equivalent to
500 cups of coffee
166 team lunches
161 months of Netflix
208 taxi rides
All processing happens in your browser. No data is sent to any server.

The cost of a meeting is people multiplied by hourly rate multiplied by hours, and the only hard part is the hourly rate. Salary alone understates it, because an employer also pays payroll taxes, insurance, pension and benefits, so this calculator includes a converter that turns an annual salary into a fully loaded hourly cost using a multiplier you choose. Set the attendee count and the duration and you get a figure before the meeting; press Start and the same figure ticks up second by second while the meeting runs, which is what makes it usable on a shared screen. Underneath, the annual projection answers the question that actually changes behaviour: what this recurring meeting costs over a year, and what fifteen minutes or two fewer attendees would give back.

Key facts about Meeting cost calculator

Key facts about Meeting cost calculator
Core formulaattendees x hourly rate x (minutes / 60)
Live ticker resolutionthe elapsed clock is polled every 100 ms and the cost is derived from wall-clock time, so a backgrounded tab does not lose seconds
Salary conversionannual salary x overhead multiplier / 2,080 paid hours a year
Why 2,080 hours52 weeks x 40 hours — paid leave is included because it is paid, so it belongs in the denominator
Fully-loaded multiplier1.45, from the US BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation series where benefits run about 31 % of total compensation
Multiplier options1.0 salary only, 1.25 light overhead, 1.45 fully loaded, 2.0 billable-cost view
CurrenciesUSD, EUR, GBP, JPY, CAD, AUD, CHF, SEK, NOK, DKK — each formatted in its own locale conventions
Overtime detectiononce elapsed time passes the planned duration the figure turns red and an overrun banner appears
Annual projection basis48 working weeks a year, not 52, so the yearly number is not inflated by holidays
Savings scenarioscutting 15 minutes, and removing 2 attendees, both projected across the year at the same cadence
Cost comparisonsillustrative consumer prices per currency — a sense of scale, not tracked market data
Not includedpreparation time, context-switching cost, follow-up work, and the opportunity cost of what those hours would otherwise produce

What happens to your file

Nothing is uploaded. Attendee counts, salaries and rates stay in React state inside this browser tab, the ticker is a plain JavaScript interval reading your own device's clock, and the page makes no request to any server while it runs. Copy summary writes text to your clipboard through the browser's clipboard API; Export JSON builds the file in memory, wraps it in a Blob and hands it to a local object URL for download — neither leaves your machine. There is no account and no local storage, so closing or reloading the tab discards everything, including any salary figure you typed. Salary data is sensitive in a way meeting metadata is not, which is exactly why it never becomes a record here.

About this tool

  1. 1

    Set the attendee count

    Use the slider, type a number, or take a quick-pick. This is bodies in the room, including anyone dialling in and anyone only half paying attention.

  2. 2

    Pick a currency

    Ten currencies are available and each formats in its own conventions, so a Danish figure reads as 1.145 kr. rather than a dollar-styled number.

  3. 3

    Enter an hourly rate, or derive one

    If you know the loaded hourly cost, type it. If you only know salaries, put an annual figure into the salary box, choose an overhead multiplier and press the Use button to load the derived rate.

  4. 4

    Choose the overhead multiplier

    1.0 counts salary alone and understates the cost. 1.45 is the fully-loaded figure implied by the BLS benefits share. 2.0 reflects how a consultancy prices internal time. Pick one and be consistent.

  5. 5

    Set the planned duration

    Use a preset or type custom minutes. The estimate updates immediately, before anyone has spent anything.

  6. 6

    Run the ticker in the meeting

    Press Start when the meeting begins and put the tab on the shared screen. Pause handles a genuine break; passing the planned duration turns the figure red and raises an overrun banner.

  7. 7

    Open the annual impact

    Set how often the meeting recurs and expand the annual block. It projects weekly, monthly and yearly cost over 48 working weeks, plus what 15 minutes less or 2 fewer attendees would return.

  8. 8

    Export the evidence

    Copy summary puts a plain-text breakdown on the clipboard for a message or a retro; Export JSON downloads the same figures as structured data.

Specs & compatibility
Attendees1 to 100, by slider, number field or quick-pick
Duration15, 25, 30, 60, 90 or 120 minutes as presets, or any custom value up to 480 minutes
Meetings per week1 to 20, used only for the annual projection
Ticker behaviourstart, pause, resume, stop; stopping freezes the figure, reset clears it
Number formattingIntl.NumberFormat with each currency's own locale — 1.145 kr. in Danish, $1,145.00 in US English
Exportsplain-text summary to clipboard, and a JSON report downloaded as meeting-cost-report.json
Browser supportany current browser; no install, no extension, no calendar permissions
Offlineworks with no network once the page has loaded
  • Use loaded cost, not salary, or the number is roughly a third too low and the argument it supports is weaker than it should be.
  • Divide by paid hours (2,080), not billable hours — an employee's holiday is paid, so excluding it from the denominator inflates the hourly figure.
  • The annual projection is the number that changes behaviour. A single 30-minute meeting looks trivial; the same meeting held weekly for a year rarely does.
  • Run the ticker on the shared screen rather than quoting the total afterwards — a visible number that moves changes how people use the last ten minutes.
  • Attendees who could have read the notes still cost full rate while they sit there, which is what the fewer-attendees saving line is for.
  • Treat the coffee and Netflix comparisons as a communication device, not data; the prices are illustrative and will not match your market.
  • The figure excludes preparation, context switching and follow-up, so it is a floor. If you need a conservative number for an argument, this is already it.
  • Live per-second cost ticker with pause, stop and overrun warning
  • Annual salary to fully-loaded hourly cost, with a sourced default multiplier
  • Ten currencies, each formatted in its own locale
  • Annual projection with 15-minutes-shorter and 2-fewer-people savings
  • Seven meeting-shape presets from standup to board meeting
  • Clipboard summary and JSON report export
  • Putting a live counter on the shared screen so a recurring status meeting finishes on time.
  • Costing a weekly all-hands over a year before proposing it becomes fortnightly.
  • Showing what a six-person kickoff actually costs when the same brief could have been a document.
  • Building the number for a proposal to cut standing meetings from five a week to two.
  • Comparing the cost of a 60-minute decision meeting against the cost of the delay if it is not held.
  • Giving a new manager a concrete figure for the meeting load they have inherited.
Take the annual salary, multiply by an overhead factor, and divide by 2,080 paid hours — 52 weeks of 40 hours. The overhead factor is what turns salary into what the employer actually pays. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics Employer Costs for Employee Compensation series puts benefits at roughly 31 % of total compensation, meaning wages are about 69 % of the whole, which implies a multiplier near 1.45. That is the default here. Employer social contributions differ sharply by country, so the multiplier is a control rather than a constant, and the salary converter on the page does exactly this arithmetic for you.
By 2,080 when you are costing an employee's time, which is what a meeting consumes. Paid holiday, public holidays and sick leave are all paid, so the annual salary buys the whole year and every paid hour carries a share of it. Dividing by billable hours instead — the approach a consultancy uses when setting a price — produces a much higher figure because it loads the cost of non-billable time onto the billable portion. That is a legitimate number for pricing external work, which is why the 2.0 multiplier option exists, but it overstates the internal cost of an hour in a room.
Yes. The elapsed time is derived from the wall clock rather than counted up tick by tick, so the cost shown reflects real time passed even if the browser throttled the interval while the tab was in the background. What it does not do is survive a reload: refreshing the page clears the ticker along with everything else, because nothing is stored. Pause when a meeting genuinely breaks, and use Stop rather than closing the tab if you want to keep the final figure on screen.
Because a recurring meeting does not actually happen 52 times. Holidays, public holidays and the quiet weeks around them remove several instances a year, and projecting over the full 52 would inflate the annual figure by about 8 %. Forty-eight is a deliberately conservative round number: it keeps the projection defensible when someone challenges it, which matters more than maximising the headline. If your meeting genuinely runs every week without exception, treat the projection as a floor.
Quite a lot, all of it in the direction of understating the cost. It counts time in the meeting only: not the preparation, not the agenda writing, not the context switch that costs people the first stretch of focus after they return, not the follow-up notes, and not the opportunity cost of whatever those hours would otherwise have produced. It also treats attendees as interchangeable at one average rate, when a room containing two senior people and four juniors has a different cost profile. Read the number as a conservative floor for an argument, not as a full accounting.
No, and that is a design decision rather than a gap. Reading your calendar would mean requesting access to it, sending meeting data somewhere, or installing an add-in — and every one of those turns a calculator into a data processor handling who meets whom and when. This page runs entirely in the browser tab with no account and no network calls, so attendee counts are typed in. That takes about three seconds and keeps your calendar, your attendee lists and your salary figures entirely on your own machine.

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