Meeting Cost Calculator - Live Running Cost Clock

How to use this tool

1. Enter the number of attendees and their average annual salary.
2. Adjust the overhead multiplier if needed.
3. Click Start to begin the live cost clock.
4. Click Pause to freeze the clock, Resume to continue, or Reset to clear elapsed time and cost.

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.