Meeting Cost Calculator - Live Running Cost Clock

The real cost of meetings

A 1-hour meeting with 8 people earning $80,000/year costs approximately $308 in direct salary alone ($80k ÷ 2080 hours × 8 people). Add benefits (typically 30% of salary), lost productivity, and context-switching costs, and the true cost is often 2–3× higher.

Meeting best practices

• Default to async: status updates, announcements, and decisions that don't require real-time debate can be handled via email, Slack, or Loom.
• Attendee audit: every person in a meeting should be there for a reason - as a decision-maker, expert, or implementer. Observers should get a recording.
• Time boxes: Jeff Bezos's "two-pizza rule" - if two pizzas can't feed the group, it's too large for a decision-making meeting.

Full true cost formula

Salary alone understates the cost of a meeting. A more complete model:

• Direct salary cost: (annual salary ÷ 2,080) × attendees × duration in hours
• Benefits multiplier: typically 1.25–1.40× salary (health, retirement, payroll taxes)
• Overhead: office space, equipment, IT - often 10–20% additional
• Opportunity cost: the value of the work each attendee is not doing during the meeting

A $5,000 meeting is only worthwhile if it produces a decision, alignment, or outcome worth more than $5,000. A weekly recurring $5K meeting costs over $260,000 per year.

Global salary benchmarks (rough hourly costs per person)

Async alternatives

Many meetings can be replaced with async-first tools that preserve context without requiring simultaneous attendance:

• Loom: asynchronous screen recording - great for demos, walkthroughs, and status updates.
• Notion / Confluence: collaborative documents for decisions, proposals, and postmortems.
• Slack / Teams threads: async discussion with searchable history - avoids the meeting entirely for most discussions.
• GitHub / Linear comments: context-specific feedback on code and tasks, kept where the work lives.