Meeting Cost Calculator

When this calculator helps

Meetings are booked across the euro area every day without anyone pricing them, yet each attendee is paid for that time whether the discussion advances anything or not. This calculator puts a euro figure on it, so 'is this meeting worth it' turns from a feeling into a number. You supply the head count, an average hourly rate and the duration, and it returns the salary cost of holding the meeting.

It is most valuable when you are deciding whether to keep, shorten or scrap a recurring slot — a daily standup, a weekly check-in, a department-wide review. For teams across European member states, where employer social charges can be substantial, seeing that a routine catch-up costs €180 of salaried time is often what prompts a tighter agenda or a shorter invite list.

How to read your result

The figure is the salaried cost of everyone's time for the duration of the meeting: rate multiplied by people multiplied by hours. It shows what you are spending in wages to have those people in the meeting instead of doing other work. A single session may look modest, but across a week of standing meetings the total mounts quickly.

Read it as a floor rather than a ceiling. Because it counts salary time alone, it almost always understates the real cost. It omits employer social security contributions, the output those colleagues would otherwise produce, and the focus broken when someone is pulled away from concentrated work. The genuine cost of a meeting runs reliably higher than the salary figure on its own.

A worked example

Consider a weekly review on a team in the euro area: seven people whose average base pay works out to around €60 an hour, meeting for 45 minutes. That single session costs roughly €315 in salaried time. Held every week across a year, it comes to about €16,400 — and that is before adding employer social charges, which in higher-charge countries such as France or Germany could push the true cost well beyond €22,000.

Common mistakes to avoid

The result is only as accurate as the rate you enter, and a few common slips make meetings look cheaper than they really are.

• Using base salary only and ignoring on-costs — employer social security contributions, pension contributions and holiday pay can add 25 to 50% on top, depending heavily on the country.
• Forgetting preparation and follow-up time; a 30-minute meeting that needs prep and a written summary costs far more than the slot itself.
• Leaving out silent attendees — people invited 'to be kept informed' who never contribute are still being paid to attend.
• Applying one junior rate to a room that actually holds senior staff, which can understate the cost by half.

European salaries and the real cost of time

To turn a salary into an hourly rate, a common euro-area convention is to divide annual pay by roughly 1,800 to 1,920 working hours, reflecting statutory holiday entitlements across member states. That yields the base rate, but it is not what an employee actually costs the employer. On top of salary sit employer social security contributions, pension contributions, holiday pay and overhead.

Crucially, those social charges vary enormously across the euro area — comparatively light in Ireland, very heavy in France or Germany — so the loading can range from around 25% to 50% or more of the headline salary. A €60,000 salary worth about €33 an hour in base terms might cost €42 to €50 an hour fully loaded, depending on the country. When you are weighing whether a meeting earns its keep, the fully-loaded figure is the honest one, and it always exceeds salary alone.