The arithmetic, and why salary alone understates it
The calculation is straightforward: convert an annual salary to an hourly rate, multiply by the number of people, multiply by the duration. The part that gets left out is that salary is not what an employee costs an organisation.
Employer taxes, benefits, insurance, equipment, software licences and premises typically add twenty-five to forty percent, and in some markets substantially more. Costing a meeting at bare salary therefore understates it by roughly a third. If your finance team publishes a fully loaded cost per head, that figure is better than any multiplier.
The working-year assumption matters too. There are 260 weekdays in a year, but nobody works all of them — after leave, public holidays and sickness, 220 to 230 productive days is more realistic, and using 260 quietly understates the hourly rate.
The number that actually changes behaviour
A single meeting's cost is mildly interesting. The annual cost of a recurring one is what makes people act, and the difference between the two is why weekly meetings deserve more scrutiny than any individual session ever gets.
An hour every week with eight people is not eight hours. It is over four hundred person-hours a year, plus the fragmentation cost of everyone's calendar being broken into pieces around it. Most recurring meetings were scheduled once, for a reason that made sense at the time, and were never revisited when that reason expired.
The productive use of this tool is therefore an audit rather than a one-off calculation. Run it across the recurring meetings in your calendar, and treat anything whose annual cost surprises you as a candidate for shortening, shrinking or replacing with something written.
Cost is not the same as waste
It is worth being careful with this, because the calculator is easily misused as an argument that meetings are bad. They are not. A decision made in an hour that would have taken three weeks of asynchronous back-and-forth is exceptional value, and a difficult conversation held properly is worth more than any amount of documentation.
The meetings worth questioning are the ones where nobody can name the outcome. A status update that could have been a written summary, a recurring sync kept alive by habit, or a decision meeting held without the decision-maker present are all expensive in a way that produces nothing.
A reasonable test before scheduling: what decision will be made, or what would go wrong if this did not happen? If neither has an answer, the meeting is a candidate for a document.
Using the figure without weaponising it
Announcing the cost at the start of a meeting is a well-known trick and it mostly makes people defensive. The number works better as a planning input than as a rebuke — used when scheduling rather than when assembled.
The most useful questions it prompts are about attendance and duration rather than existence. Does the eighth person need to be here, or could they read the notes? Does this need an hour because it needs an hour, or because the calendar defaults to one? Halving both attendance and duration cuts the cost by three quarters.
And keep the figures private. Salary data is among the most sensitive information any organisation holds — which is a good reason to use a tool that calculates in your browser and transmits nothing, as this one does.