How to calculate meeting cost per year, and what to cut

A one-hour weekly meeting looks harmless on a calendar. It is one block, once a week. But it repeats about 48 times a year, for everyone in the room, and nobody ever sees the total.

This guide shows how to calculate meeting cost per year, with the formula and a worked example, and then what to do with the number: rate each meeting, sort it into one of four groups, and make the changes that save the most. The point is not to cancel every meeting. It is to see the trade clearly.

Why look at meeting cost at all?

A recurring meeting is a standing order on everyone’s week. Once it is on the calendar, it renews itself forever unless someone stops to ask whether it is still worth it. Most teams never do, so meetings pile up: the stand-up that grew to 30 minutes, the status meeting that outlived its project, the sync with twelve people where four talk.

Putting a yearly number next to each one is a simple way to start that conversation. It turns “we have too many meetings” into “this one costs as much as a conference trip for the whole team, every year”.

The meeting cost formula

For one sitting:

Cost per meeting = sum of attendees’ hourly pay × length in hours × overhead

For the year:

Yearly cost = cost per meeting × number of meetings a year

A few details make it honest:

• Hourly pay is yearly gross pay divided by yearly work hours. In the US that is usually 2,080 hours (40 hours × 52 weeks).
• Overhead covers what an employer pays on top of salary, such as taxes, benefits and office costs. A factor of 1.3 is a common rough figure. Leave it out if you want the plain salary cost.
• Meetings a year depends on working weeks. With holidays and leave, 48 weeks is a fair default: a weekly meeting happens 48 times, every two weeks 24 times, daily 240 times.

A worked example

A weekly product sync: eight people, 60 minutes, average pay of $50 an hour.

Step	Sum	Result
Pay for the hour	8 × $50	$400
With overhead	$400 × 1.3	$520 per meeting
Per year	$520 × 48	$24,960 a year
People-hours per year	8 × 1 h × 48	384 hours

That one calendar block costs about $25,000 and close to ten working weeks of people’s time every year. None of that makes it a bad meeting. It makes it a meeting worth an honest look once a quarter.

Price the meeting, not the people

There is an easy way to get this wrong: using real salaries. Looking up what each person earns turns a meeting review into a conversation about who is expensive, which is unfair and beside the point.

Use public pay statistics by role and level instead: a mid-level engineer, a senior product manager. The number is close enough to compare meetings with each other, and it never says anything about a specific person. The groups below judge the meeting, never the people in it.

Rate it, then decide: keep, shrink, fix or cut

Cost alone does not tell you what to do. An expensive meeting can be worth every minute. So give each recurring meeting a value from 1 to 5, your honest view today, and put cost and value together:

Group	When	What to do
Keep	Worth it and not expensive	Leave it alone.
Shrink	Worth it but costly	Make it shorter, or invite fewer people.
Fix	Cheap but not useful	Write a better agenda, or move it to a written update.
Cut	Costly and not useful, or a waste of time	Cancel it or replace it with a written update.

In Manager Kit, “costly” means at or above the middle of your recurring meetings by yearly cost, “worth it” means a value of 3 or more, and a meeting rated 1 goes in Cut whatever it costs.

Changes that save the most

Some changes save far more than others. Using the $24,960 product sync above:

• Shorten it from 60 to 45 minutes: saves $6,240 a year. Meetings fill the time they are given.
• Hold it every two weeks instead of weekly: saves $12,480. Meeting less often is the cheapest fix to try first.
• Cut a daily meeting to 15 minutes: daily meetings add up fast; a tight stand-up keeps the habit.
• Invite only the people who decide: when eight or more attend, others can read the notes.
• Send one manager, not three: managers are the most expensive seats, and one can report back.

Your 1:1s count too

Every person you hold regular 1:1s with is a meeting of two in the totals. For most managers that is time well spent; there is more on why in one-on-one meetings. Seeing 1:1s next to the status meetings simply makes the trade clear: an hour cut from a twelve-person status meeting pays for a lot of 1:1s.

Try the free Meeting Cost tool

If you want to run these numbers today, Meeting Cost is free. It has pay data by role and level for the US, the UK, Germany and Türkiye, a live counter while a meeting runs, and the yearly cost of recurring meetings with suggestions to save. It is a single file that runs in your browser, the rates stay on your machine, and there is nothing to install.

If your week is also full of meetings you run, a short Friday look back helps you catch them; see weekly review for managers.

How Manager Kit helps with meeting cost

In Manager Kit, the Meeting cost module does the same sums from your real team: each person is priced with the role and level on their page, from public pay statistics, never from anyone’s real salary. Your regular 1:1s come in by themselves from the 1:1 schedule. You rate each meeting from 1 to 5, the kit places it in Keep, Shrink, Fix or Cut, and suggestions show how much each change would save a year. A backup from the free Meeting Cost tool comes into the kit.