Meeting Cost Calculator

Features

• Live cost ticking upward during the meeting
• Overhead multiplier for true employment cost
• Annualised projection for recurring meetings
• Six currencies
• Comparison against the scheduled duration

How to use it

1. Enter how many people are attending and their average salary.
2. Press Start when the meeting actually begins.
3. Watch the cost accumulate.
4. Check the annual figure if this meeting recurs.

Reading these numbers honestly

Salary alone understates what an employee costs. Employer pension contributions, national insurance or payroll taxes, equipment, software licences, office space and benefits typically add 25% to 40% on top, which is what the overhead multiplier accounts for. The default of 1.3 is a reasonable middle estimate for a knowledge worker; check your own finance team's figure if you have access to it.

The annualised number is usually the one that changes behaviour. A weekly hour-long meeting with eight people is not an hour, it is over 400 person-hours a year, which is a quarter of a full-time role. That framing tends to prompt better questions than the per-meeting figure: does everyone need to be there, could it be fortnightly, could the status update be a written summary?

One caveat worth stating plainly. Cost is not the same as value, and a tool like this can encourage a false precision. Meetings that build alignment, surface a problem early or resolve something that would otherwise take a week of asynchronous back-and-forth are often worth far more than they cost. The useful application is spotting the recurring meeting nobody can justify, not treating every conversation as an expense to be minimised.