Meeting Cost Calculator

Take an annual salary and divide by 2,080 (US full-time convention: 40 hours × 52 weeks). For a fully-loaded figure, add roughly 25–40% on top — payroll taxes (~7.65% employer FICA), benefits, paid time off, and overhead. So a $100,000 salary is roughly $48/hr base, ~$60–$67/hr fully-loaded.

Only what you put in. The cost we compute is the time-cost of the people on the call. Hidden costs — context-switching, lost flow time, the meta-cost of writing meeting summaries and follow-ups — aren't captured here. The Microsoft 2024 Work Trend Index found employees attend ~3 hours of meetings per day on average, much of which is rated low-value; this calculator quantifies what that's costing.

Static numbers are easy to dismiss. Watching $400 tick by during a status meeting that didn't need to happen is harder to ignore. Use the live counter as a personal sanity check when scheduling, or share it as part of a broader conversation about meeting hygiene — not as a way to put colleagues on the spot.

The math is exact (rate × people × time). The accuracy hinges on your rate input — most teams mix ICs ($35–$60/hr fully-loaded), managers ($75–$120), and senior staff ($150+), so a single average is a rough proxy. For deciding whether a meeting is worth holding, the rough figure is plenty.

Single meetings always feel cheap. A 30-minute weekly meeting with 6 people at $80/hr is just $240 — feels like nothing. Held weekly for a year, it's $12,480 and the equivalent of 156 person-hours not spent on building, selling, or shipping. The annual framing is the one that drives decisions.