How to Use This Tool
List who attends with their salaries, set the length, and say whether it recurs. The annual figure is the one worth looking at.
Salary is not what a person costs
An employer pays more than the salary: payroll taxes, pension or retirement contributions, insurance, equipment, software licences and space. The total is typically 25–40% above salary, which is why the overhead field defaults to 30%.
A 75,000 salary over 2,080 paid hours is 36.06 an hour. Fully loaded at 30% it is 46.88. Costing meetings at the salary rate understates them by roughly a third, consistently and in the flattering direction.
2,080 hours is the standard convention — 40 hours × 52 weeks — and it counts paid leave and public holidays as working time. Using actual worked hours instead would raise the hourly figure further.
Recurrence is where the money is
A single meeting rarely looks expensive. Eight people for an hour at 60 each is 480, which is unremarkable next to any other line in a budget.
The same meeting every week is 24,960 a year — a salary, spent without a decision, a budget line, or anyone able to point at it. A daily 15-minute stand-up with the same eight people is 30,000.
This is the argument for auditing recurring meetings rather than individual ones. A one-off workshop that costs 2,000 was at least a choice; a standing invitation that costs 25,000 usually was not.
What the number is good for, and what it is not
It is a useful prompt and a bad weapon.
Used well, it makes an invisible cost visible so it can be compared against alternatives: a written update, a smaller group, a shorter slot, or a decision made by whoever owns it. "This recurring meeting costs 25,000 a year, is it worth that" is a reasonable question.
Used badly, it implies that meetings are waste. They are not — a decision made in twenty minutes of conversation can be worth far more than twenty minutes of anyone's salary, and the alternative is often a week of asynchronous confusion that costs more. The calculation cannot see value, only cost.
The costs this cannot count
- Interruption. A meeting in the middle of a morning does not just consume its own hour; it fragments the time either side, and focused work does not resume instantly.
- Preparation and follow-up. Reading materials, writing notes, chasing actions. The optional 15 minutes here is a placeholder rather than a measurement.
- Attendance that is not attention. People in a meeting doing other work are being paid for both and doing neither well.
All of these push the real figure up, so treat the output as a floor.
