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Your meetings have a price tag. Here it is.

Enter your headcount, salaries and how much of the week goes to meetings. You'll get one annual dollar figure, then a price tag on each of nine bad habits.

Free calculator · no signup · no email required

Meeting cost calculator

Start with your team's numbers to get the headline cost. Then dial in nine everyday meeting habits, like late starts, missing agendas, and action items nobody closes, to see what's driving it.

Your team, in three groups

Split your headcount into execs, managers, and everyone else. We'll blend the salaries and meeting load into one number.

Salary shown as

Executives

≈ 2 people
5%
80%
$140

Management

≈ 7 people
20%
50%
$65

Everyone else

≈ 26 people
75%
25%
$25
6

Headcount on a typical invite.

Right now, this team spends

$1,116,369

a year in meetings

Your average meeting costs $205. That's 3,893 meetings a year.

Nine habits, nine price tags

Every one of these is fixable. Set each slider to how often it happens on your team, and the red figure under it is what it costs you a year.

10%

Warm bodies, cold ROI.

$81,459 in wasted spend / yr

60%

Winging it isn't free.

$108,916 in wasted spend / yr

1%

Held anyway. Solved nothing.

$5,582 in wasted spend / yr

20%

The tangent tax.

$44,655 in wasted spend / yr

20%

Same topic, next week's calendar.

$159,902 in wasted spend / yr

5 mins

Multiply by everyone waiting.

$94,786 in wasted spend / yr

10 mins

The overrun nobody blocked time for.

$105,318 in wasted spend / yr

70%

If nobody wrote it down, did it happen?

$158,393 in wasted spend / yr

50%

Agreed on Tuesday, forgotten by Friday.

$43,998 in wasted spend / yr

Fix these nine habits and get back

$803,010

a year

Recalculates instantly as you move the sliders above.

the formula

How to calculate the cost of a meeting

Six people averaging $65 an hour in a one-hour meeting cost $390. Held weekly, that one meeting costs about $19,500 a year, before anyone counts the prep or the follow-up.

Run your numbers Read the full guide
  1. 1

    Count the people in the room

    Everyone on the invite, including the person who only came to listen.

  2. 2

    Multiply by their average hourly rate

    Annual salary divided by about 1,900 working hours gets you close enough. Add benefits and payroll tax if you want the fully loaded figure.

  3. 3

    Multiply by the length of the meeting

    In hours, so a 30-minute meeting is 0.5.

  4. 4

    Multiply by how often it happens

    A weekly meeting runs about 50 times a year once holidays come out.

Meeting Cost FAQ

The Math

How do you calculate the cost of a meeting?
Multiply the number of attendees by their average hourly rate and by the meeting's length in hours. Six people averaging $65 an hour in a one-hour meeting cost $390. Multiply by how often the meeting runs to get the yearly figure: held weekly, that one costs about $19,500 a year.
Should I use salary or fully loaded cost?
Salary is the conservative number and the easiest to defend in a budget conversation. If your finance team uses a fully loaded rate that includes benefits and payroll tax, enter that instead and the totals will rise to match.
How does this calculator work out the team total?
For each of the three groups, it multiplies headcount by the average hourly rate and by the share of time that group spends in meetings, then scales that to 1,900 working hours a year. The meeting count assumes an average meeting of 53 minutes with the number of attendees you set.
How are the nine habit costs estimated?
Each habit uses a fixed assumption about how much of the affected time is wasted. For example, a late start loses 90% of the late minutes for everyone waiting, an attendee who didn't need to be there wastes about 90% of their time in the room, and a meeting with no minutes shared costs about an hour and a half of rework afterwards. Set a slider to zero to take that habit out of the total.

Using the Calculator

Is the calculator free? Do I need to sign up?
It's free, with no signup and no email. Download the PDF summary to share the result with your team or your finance lead.
Where are my numbers saved?
The math runs in your browser, and your inputs are saved on this device only so you can pick up where you left off. Use Reset to defaults to clear them.
How do I get the number down?
Start with the most expensive habit in the list. For most teams, the fastest wins are a timed agenda and a shorter invite list. Less Meeting tracks meeting time and cost across your team, so you can see whether the number moves. Read the full guide to meeting cost.

That number doesn't have to be permanent.

Less Meeting tracks meeting time and cost across your whole team, so you can watch this number change week to week without keeping a spreadsheet.

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