Meeting Cost Calculator

When this calculator helps

Most meetings get booked without anyone pricing them, yet every attendee in the room is paid for that half-hour whether the conversation moves anything forward or not. This calculator puts a pound figure on that time so the question 'is this meeting worth it' stops being a feeling and becomes a number. You give it the head count, an average hourly rate and the duration, and it returns the salary cost of holding the meeting.

It is most useful when you are deciding whether to keep, shorten or cancel something on the calendar — a standing project sync, an all-hands, a weekly review. UK teams running lean, especially in SMEs where headcount costs are watched closely, can use it to make the case for fewer attendees or a tighter agenda. Seeing that a routine catch-up costs £150 of salaried time often changes how it is run.

How to read your result

The figure is the salaried cost of everyone's time for the length of the meeting: rate multiplied by people multiplied by hours. It tells you what you are spending in wages to have those people in the room rather than doing other work. A single meeting may look modest, but multiplied across a week of recurring slots it adds up quickly.

Read it as a floor, not a ceiling. The number reflects salary time only, so it almost always understates the true cost. It leaves out employer on-costs, the lost output those people would otherwise produce, and the focus that gets broken when someone is pulled out of deep work. The real expense of a meeting is reliably higher than the salary figure alone.

A worked example

Picture a weekly project review in a London team: six people whose average salary works out to roughly £50 an hour of base pay, meeting for 45 minutes. That single session costs about £225 in salaried time. Run every week across a year, it comes to around £11,700 — and that is before you load on employer National Insurance and pension contributions, which would push the genuine cost comfortably past £15,000.

Common mistakes to avoid

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

• Using base salary only and ignoring on-costs — employer National Insurance, pension contributions and benefits typically add around 30% on top.
• Forgetting preparation and follow-up time; a 30-minute meeting that needs 15 minutes of prep per person costs far more than the slot itself.
• Leaving out silent attendees — people invited 'just in case' who never speak are still being paid to be there.
• Applying one junior rate to a room that actually contains senior managers, which can understate the cost by half.

UK salaries and the real cost of time

To turn a salary into an hourly rate, a rough UK convention is to divide annual pay by around 1,900 working hours. That gives the base figure, but it is not what an employee actually costs the business. On top of salary sit employer National Insurance contributions (charged above the secondary threshold), workplace pension contributions under auto-enrolment, holiday pay and general overhead.

Together those on-costs commonly add somewhere around a quarter to a third to the headline salary, so a £40,000 salary worth roughly £21 an hour in base terms costs nearer £27 an hour fully loaded. When you are weighing up whether a meeting earns its keep, the fully-loaded figure is the honest one — and it is always higher than salary alone suggests.