Find out exactly how much that meeting is costing your company. In real time.
This calculator estimates the cost of a meeting based on the number of attendees, their average hourly compensation, and the meeting duration. The true cost of a meeting includes not just salary time but also lost productivity: attendees cannot work on revenue-generating tasks during meetings, and research shows it takes an average of 23 minutes to regain deep focus after an interruption. The calculator optionally factors in this "context switching" overhead.
Enter the number of attendees, average annual salary or hourly rate, and meeting length in minutes. The calculator shows the total cost of the meeting, per-minute cost, and the annualized cost if this meeting recurs weekly. Toggle on the productivity overhead option to include the estimated 23-minute recovery time per attendee. The Hourly to Salary Calculator can help estimate attendee hourly rates from annual salaries.
Research consistently shows that meetings are among the least productive workplace activities. The most effective meetings share several characteristics: a written agenda distributed 24 hours in advance, a clear decision or outcome goal, the minimum number of required attendees, a designated facilitator, and a hard stop time. Amazon's "two pizza rule" (no meeting should have more attendees than can be fed by two pizzas, roughly 6 to 8 people) keeps discussions focused. Standing meetings naturally run 34% shorter than seated ones. The most impactful single change organizations can make is converting status update meetings to async written updates (Slack, email, shared docs), reserving synchronous meeting time for decisions, brainstorming, and relationship building that genuinely benefit from real-time interaction.