Question 1

How do you calculate the cost of a meeting?

Accepted Answer

Each attendee's annual salary is multiplied by a loaded-cost factor, divided by the hours in a working year to get an hourly cost, then multiplied by the length of the meeting. Add those together for every attendee and you have the cost of the meeting. The default assumptions are 2,080 hours in a working year, which is 52 weeks of 40 hours, and a 1.3x loaded-cost multiplier. Both are editable, and the whole calculation runs in your browser.

Question 2

What is a fully-loaded cost multiplier and why does it matter?

Accepted Answer

Salary is not what an employee costs. On top of base pay an employer carries payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, software licences and a share of facilities and shared functions. Multiplying base salary by roughly 1.25 to 1.4 covers the direct additions, and around 1.5 starts to allocate general overhead too. Using salary alone will understate the cost of every meeting by a quarter or more, which is why this calculator defaults to 1.3 rather than 1.0.

Question 3

Where do the salary bands come from?

Accepted Answer

They are our own estimates, not a salary survey, and the tool says so rather than dressing them up with a fake citation. Each one describes a mid-level individual contributor at a mid-size company in a major metro, as annual base pay before bonus and equity. They are stated separately for each currency as local market figures rather than converted from dollars, because a US salary converted into rupees or euros describes nobody. Every figure is editable — replacing the presets with your own payroll numbers is the point.

Question 4

How much does a recurring weekly meeting cost per year?

Accepted Answer

Multiply the cost of one occurrence by how often it runs: 52 times for weekly, 26 for fortnightly, 12 for monthly, and 260 for every working day, which is the standard count of working days in a year. A weekly one-hour meeting with six people on mid-level salaries typically lands in the tens of thousands per year once loaded costs are included, which is the figure worth putting in front of whoever owns the invite.

Question 5

Could this meeting have been an email?

Accepted Answer

The verdict on this page is a rule of thumb, and the page shows you exactly which rules fired rather than hiding the logic. It counts attendees over five and over eight, length over 60 and over 90 minutes, and whether the meeting recurs fortnightly or more often. More triggers means the format is doing less work per person in the room. It is a prompt to look at the invite, not a judgement about your particular meeting — a well-run hour with eight people can be the cheapest way to settle something that would otherwise take a fortnight of messages.

Question 6

Should working hours be 2,080 or lower?

Accepted Answer

2,080 is 52 weeks times 40 hours, and it is the conventional figure. It ignores public holidays and leave, so it slightly understates what an actually-worked hour costs. Subtracting around 25 days of holiday and leave gives roughly 1,880 hours and raises the hourly rate about 11 per cent. Neither is wrong; they answer slightly different questions. The field is editable so you can use whichever your finance team uses.

Meeting cost calculator

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