Meeting Cost Calculator

Every meeting has a price.

find out yours

Enter who is in the room and how long it runs. You get the cost of one meeting, and of the whole year it repeats for.

6
minutes
per year
$
This meeting costs
$356
Per minute
$5.94
Loaded rate
$59/h
Person-hours
6.0 h
Cost per year, repeating weekly
$18,525
312 h
person-hours a year
39
full working days
$3,088
per person a year
live meter

Start it when the meeting starts

The counter runs on the same numbers as above. Put it on the shared screen and watch what the last ten minutes of a status call actually cost.

Spent so far
$0.00
Elapsed
00:00
Burn rate
$5.94/min
Status
Ready
the bigger number

One meeting is the easy part. Your calendar is the real number.

Spry connects to Google and Outlook calendars and prices every meeting across your company — so you see which recurring ones quietly eat the budget, and which hours are worth protecting.

Recurring meetings, pricedlast 30 days
Weekly status call
12 people · 60 min · weekly
$37,050
Daily standup
8 people · 15 min · daily
$30,875
Cross-team sync
16 people · 45 min · biweekly
$18,525
Flagged as reducible$37,050
Illustrative figures from a 40-person company.

How the cost is calculated

The calculator uses the fully loaded hourly rate of everyone in the room — not just base salary. An employee costs more than their paycheck, and a meeting costs the sum of everyone sitting in it.

hourly rate =
annual salary × 1.3 ÷ 2,080 h
meeting cost =
hourly rate × attendees × (minutes ÷ 60)
annual cost =
meeting cost × occurrences per year

2,080 hours is a standard full-time year (40 hours × 52 weeks). The 1.3× fully loaded multiplier covers payroll taxes, benefits, software and workspace; finance teams often use 1.2–1.4.

What the number leaves out

This is a floor, not a ceiling. Three costs sit outside the calendar invite:

Context switching
Getting back into deep work after an interruption takes most people 15–25 minutes. A 30-minute meeting rarely costs 30 minutes.
Fragmented calendars
Three meetings spread across a day can remove the whole day's capacity for focused work, even though only three hours are booked.
Decisions not made
A meeting that ends without an owner and a deadline usually schedules another meeting. The cost compounds.

What a heavy meeting load looks like

Rough weekly benchmarks. Above the top of each range, focus time is usually the first thing to disappear from the calendar.

8–12hrs
Individual contributors
Standups, planning, one recurring cross-team sync.
15–25hrs
Managers
1:1s, team rituals, stakeholder updates, hiring loops.
25hrs+
Executives
The most expensive hours in the company, booked back to back.
3–5hrs
Typical weekly saving
What teams reclaim per person after a calendar audit with Spry.

Four ways to lower the number

01

Cut the invite list

Cost scales linearly with attendees. Dropping two people from a weekly meeting is the fastest saving on this page. See how RACI can cut meeting attendance.
02

Change the default slot

Move the calendar default from 30 and 60 to 25 and 50 minutes. Same agenda, 17% less cost, and a gap between calls. Rethink your weekly meeting cadence.
03

No agenda, no meeting

Require a written purpose and a decision owner. Meetings without either are the ones that repeat forever. Use this executive agenda template.
04

Audit recurring meetings

Recurring invites are where the annual number comes from. Review them quarterly and cancel by default. See the calendar audit framework, or move status updates async.

Frequently asked questions

How do you calculate the cost of a meeting?

Take each attendee's fully loaded hourly rate, multiply by the length of the meeting in hours, and add everyone together. Hourly rate here is annual salary divided by 2,080 working hours, times an overhead factor for taxes, benefits and tooling.

Why include an overhead multiplier?

Salary is not the full cost of an employee. Payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, software and workspace typically add 20–40% on top. We use 1.3× as a mid-range estimate, so the hourly rate reflects the real cost to the business rather than take-home pay.

Does this include lost productivity?

By default it counts only the paid time spent in the meeting. Context switching before and after adds roughly 15–25 minutes per person. Turn on context switching to add 15 minutes per attendee, and treat even that as a lower bound.

What is a normal weekly meeting load?

Individual contributors usually sit in 8–12 hours a week, managers 15–25, executives 25 or more. Past the top of each range, deep work is generally the first thing to disappear.

Is my data stored anywhere?

No. Everything runs in your browser. The only thing that leaves the page is the share link you choose to copy, which carries the numbers you entered.

You weren't hired to sit in meetings all day

Spry shows you where time and money go across the whole company — turning wasted hours into clarity and focus.

Work shouldn’t feel like a full‑time calendar

Work shouldn’t feel like
a full‑time calendar

Let’s protect your team’s focus and put a price
on wasted time.

Let’s protect your team’s focus and put a price on wasted time.

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Book demo

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Or email hello@spryplan.com

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