How this is calculated
Meetings have an obvious cost — the salaries of the people sitting in them — and a much larger hidden one: the focused work that didn't get done because everyone was in a room instead. This calculator measures the obvious cost. It is deliberately simple, because the simple number is already large enough to change behaviour.
The formula has three steps. First, we convert each attendee's annual salary into an hourly rate using the conventional 2,080 work-hours-per-year figure (52 weeks × 40 hours). Second, we multiply that hourly rate by the meeting's duration in hours and by the number of attendees. Third, we project the per-meeting cost over a year and a decade based on how often the meeting recurs.
The hourly-rate divisor of 2,080 is the standard one used in payroll, contract pricing, and most cost-of-labour models in the United States. It assumes a 40-hour week and 52 weeks per year — i.e. no holiday or vacation. That overstates real working hours slightly, which means the hourly-rate number is a touch low, which means the meeting cost we report here is conservative. We prefer to under-claim than to over-claim.
The single salary input is an average across attendees. In practice meetings are usually a mix of seniorities — a Director-attended sync that includes two managers and four ICs has a different cost profile than the same meeting with seven peers. The simple average is good enough for almost all use cases. If you want a more precise number, run the calculator twice with different averages and add the results, or split into a senior group and a junior group.
We do not include benefits, payroll taxes, equity, employer overhead, or office costs. Fully-loaded employee cost is typically 1.3×–1.5× base salary depending on your benefits package, location, and how you count things like office rent. If you want fully-loaded numbers, multiply your average salary input by 1.4 before entering it. We chose to default to base salary because base salary is what people actually know — almost no one knows their loaded cost, and asking for it would make the calculator harder to use without making the answer meaningfully better.
The annual and decade projections assume the meeting recurs at the same cadence with the same attendees and duration for the entire period. A meeting you'll only run for the next quarter, a meeting that loses a couple of attendees as the team shrinks, a meeting that gets shorter once it finds its rhythm — none of those nuances are modelled here. Take the long-horizon numbers as a thought experiment: "if this meeting kept running as it is for ten years, this is what it would cost." That framing is more useful than it sounds, because the question "would I pay $130,000 for the value this meeting produces?" has a different texture than "would I pay $260 for it this Wednesday?"
The decade number isn't a forecast — it's a way to see scale. Most recurring meetings get scheduled once, never seriously re-evaluated, and quietly outlive the team they were created for. If the decade cost would buy a senior engineer for a year, that's a useful thing to know.
The biggest cost we don't measure is opportunity cost — the deep work that meetings interrupt. A 30-minute meeting in the middle of someone's afternoon often costs them an hour or more of focused output, because context-switching is expensive. If you wanted to be honest about it, you could roughly double the numbers below. We didn't, because we don't know your team's interrupt cost and we'd rather give you a number you can defend.
Use the calculator as a conversation-opener: pick your worst recurring meeting, plug it in, and ask whether the value created clears the bar.