While you deliver
Meeting Cost Calculator
Put a figure on one meeting in a line, or read a whole calendar export and see what every recurring series costs over a year, who it takes the time from, and where two meetings are doing one job.
Type one meeting in, or read an .ics calendar export from Outlook or Google inside your browser. Attendee names and addresses are read there and never uploaded.
$480
Each meeting, salary
8 h of people's time.
$624
Each meeting, fully loaded
At 1.3 times salary.
$29,952
A year, fully loaded
48 meetings: $23,040 in salary.
384 h
People's time a year
About 10 working weeks of one person.
What this assumed, and how
- Everybody is priced at the same salary cost, $60.00 an hour. For a calendar with different people at different rates, use the calendar tab.
- Fully loaded cost is salary times 1.3, for employer taxes, benefits and overhead. It is a multiplier, not a measurement.
- Preparation, follow-up and the time it takes to get back into other work are not counted. They are real; add them above if you can put a figure on them.
- Weekly: 48 meetings a year.
The recurring meetings are where the hours are
A calendar looks like a list of meetings, but most of its hours come from a handful of series that repeat every week. Counting each series once, as many calculators do, misses nearly all of it. Here every series is expanded across the window you choose, on every date it actually falls: weekly, every other week, the second Tuesday of the month, every weekday. Skipped weeks come off, moved meetings count on the day they moved to, and cancelled ones are left out.
Short and often beats long and rare
A 15-minute stand-up with six people costs an hour and a half of people’s time a day. Over a year that is more than an hour-long weekly meeting with seven people. Neither is wrong to have, but the stand-up is rarely the one anybody thinks of as expensive. The table sorts every series by what it costs over the window, so the answer is in the order of the rows.
Salary, and fully loaded
An hour of someone’s time costs their salary for that hour, and more once employer taxes, benefits and overhead are added. Both are shown. The multiplier for the second is yours to set: 1.3 is a common rule of thumb, and it is wrong at both ends of the pay scale, so if your finance team has a figure, use it. Rates for particular people can be pasted in by email address or name.
Two meetings, one audience
When two recurring series share most of their attendees, one of them can often absorb the other. The tool lists every pair of series with at least three people in common and seven in ten of their combined audience shared, with the hours a week between them.
What this does not do
It prices time; it cannot say whether the time was well spent, and a costly meeting can be the cheapest way to make a hard decision. It sees only the calendar you give it, so each attendee’s other meetings are invisible. Preparation, follow-up and the time it takes to get back into other work are not counted unless you add them. And a few rare recurrence rules are not read: when one turns up, the tool names the series and says its total is short, rather than guessing.