Meeting Cost
$0.00
0:00:00 elapsed
Attendees
5
Average Salary
$/yr
Cost / min
$0.00
Cost / hr
$0.00
Productivity lost
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About this tool
Meeting Cost Tracker
Meeting Cost Tracker shows what a meeting is costing in real time, from the number of attendees and their salaries.
How to use it
- Enter the attendees and their approximate salaries.
- Start the timer when the meeting begins.
- Watch the running cost.
The arithmetic nobody does
The cost is the sum of each attendee's hourly rate multiplied by the elapsed time. An hourly rate from a salary is roughly the salary divided by 2,080 working hours, though the true loaded cost including benefits and overhead is meaningfully higher.
The figure is usually startling. Eight people on 75,000 dollar salaries in a one-hour meeting is close to 290 dollars of salary alone, and a weekly recurring version of it is around 15,000 dollars a year.
Worked example
A standard recurring meeting:
- Attendees8
- Average salary$75,000
- Duration1 hour weekly
Result: About $290 per meeting and roughly $15,000 a year in salary cost alone.
When it helps
- Making the case for cutting a recurring meeting.
- Deciding whether everyone genuinely needs to attend.
- Justifying the effort of writing an agenda.
- Giving a team a shared reason to end early.
Common mistakes
- Displaying the running cost during the meeting, which usually creates resentment rather than efficiency.
- Treating salary as the full cost. Loaded cost including benefits and overhead is considerably higher.
- Concluding all meetings are waste. The comparison is against the cost of not aligning, which is sometimes far larger.
