Meeting Cost Calculator
Find out what the meeting you’re about to accept really costs. Enter attendees, hourly cost, length and frequency: cost per meeting, month and year.
The math everyone avoids
Accepting a meeting commits money, not just time. A weekly one-hour meeting with six people at a loaded €50/h costs €15,600 a year. That’s more than many junior salaries. Yet almost nobody stops to ask whether the meeting is worth that money. This calculator gives you the number in ten seconds so the conversation stops being abstract.
The most telling metric is the share of your team’s time spent in meetings. For individual contributors, healthy is under 20%. For managers, 40–60%. If your creative team spends more than a full day a week in meetings, you don’t have a creative team: you have an admin team.
Meetings you can almost always kill
- • Status meetings: replace them with an async update in Slack or Notion.
- • Recurring all-hands: cut them to monthly or quarterly. People dread them and they add little.
- • “Just in case” meetings: make an agenda mandatory. No agenda, cancel.
- • Meetings with more than 8 people: turn them into a presentation or a doc. Eight people weighing in don’t produce consensus.
- • Meetings without the decision-maker: if the person who decides isn’t there, it’s not a meeting: it’s a chat.
Meetings that are almost always worth it
- • 1:1s with your manager: feedback, priorities, unblocking.
- • Quarterly retrospectives: with an agenda, they lead to decisions.
- • Project kickoffs: early alignment saves rework.
- • Face-to-face client meetings: worth the cost if they close a deal or unblock the work.