Meeting Cost Calculator
Watch your meeting cost tick up in real time. Eye-opening for anyone who schedules long meetings.
Cost So Far
$0.00
00:00 elapsed
Meeting Parameters
Per Minute
$4.01
Per Hour
$240.38
Annual (weekly)
$0.00
Dev-hours equiv.
0.0h
About Meeting Cost Calculator
The Meeting Cost Calculator shows you the real financial cost of your meetings as they happen. Enter the number of attendees and the average annual salary or hourly rate, then hit Start — watch the dollar figure climb in real time as seconds tick by. Stats like cost per minute, cost per hour, and equivalent developer-hours make it easy to see just how expensive a long meeting really is. Use it to build awareness around how much recurring or overly long meetings cost your organization, and make more intentional decisions about who attends and for how long.
Built and maintained by Meet Shah · Last updated
What this tool is used for
- Showing the salary cost of a recurring meeting.
- Comparing the cost of a large meeting against a written update.
- Making a case for shortening a standing meeting.
- Estimating the cost of a whole workshop day before scheduling one.
- Getting a figure to open a conversation about meeting load.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How does it turn an annual salary into a per-second rate?
- Salary ÷ 2080 gives an hourly rate — 2080 being 40 hours × 52 weeks, the standard US full-time year — then × attendees ÷ 3600 gives cost per second. A $100,000 salary is $48.08 an hour, so five people in a room burn about $0.067 every second.
- Is the timer accurate if I switch tabs?
- Yes. It reads the wall clock on each tick rather than counting its own ticks, which matters because browsers throttle timers in hidden tabs to roughly one per second. A counter adding a fixed increment per tick reports a fraction of the real time — in exactly the situation this tool exists for.
- Does salary reflect what an employee actually costs?
- No, it understates it. Payroll taxes, benefits, equipment and office space typically add 25–40% on top, so a fully-loaded rate is usually salary × 1.3 or more. If you want the figure a finance team would recognise, enter the loaded hourly rate in the hourly mode rather than the headline salary.
- What is the annualised figure multiplying by?
- 52 — one occurrence per week for a year. It answers 'what does this meeting cost if it becomes a standing weekly?', which is the question that changes decisions: a 30-minute weekly sync of five $100k employees is around $6,250 a year. For a fortnightly meeting, halve it.
- Why express the cost in developer-hours?
- Because a dollar figure is easy to wave away and an opportunity cost is not. Dividing by an assumed $75/hour turns the meeting into the number of engineering hours it displaced. It is a rough rate deliberately — the point is the unit, which makes the trade-off explicit rather than abstract.
Common errors and gotchas
- Using salary alone, which understates the real cost — employer contributions and overheads add substantially.
- Treating the figure as a saving, since the time does not automatically become productive.
- Ignoring the cost of context switching around the meeting, which is real and unmeasured here.
- Using it to argue against meetings that are genuinely the cheapest way to decide something.
- Comparing costs without comparing what each meeting produced.