Meeting Cost Calculator

Rough rule: take an annual salary and divide by ~2,000 (close to UK full-time hours per year — the ONS figure is ~1,920 for full-time work, ~1,900 if you exclude bank holidays). For a fully-loaded figure, add about 30% on top to cover employer National Insurance (13.8% above the threshold), pension auto-enrolment contributions, paid holiday, and general overhead. So a £40,000 salary is roughly £20/hr base, ~£26/hr fully-loaded.

Only what you put in. The cost we compute is the time-cost of the people in the room. The hidden costs of meetings — context-switching, lost flow time, the tax of follow-up communications — aren't captured here, but they're real. If anything, this calculator underestimates.

Because the abstract figure is easy to dismiss. Watching £200 tick by during a meeting that wasn't on the agenda is harder to ignore than seeing the static estimate before it. Use it as a personal sanity check when scheduling, or share with your team if you're trying to make the case for fewer or shorter meetings — not as a way to guilt-trip individual colleagues mid-discussion.

Mathematically exact: rate × people × time. Practically: as accurate as your hourly rate input. Most teams have a mix of seniorities and fully-loaded costs, so a single average is a rough proxy. For a back-of-envelope figure on whether to push back on a calendar invite, that's enough.

Because individual meetings feel cheap and recurring meetings stack up fast. A 30-minute weekly standup with 5 people at £50/hr looks like £125. Held weekly for a year, it's £6,500 — the equivalent of 130 person-hours that could have been spent on actual work. The annual figure is the one that shifts decisions.